


to live is to burn to live

by blarbles



Series: coalescing, finally converging [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Anxiety, Canon-Typical Violence, Depression, Emotionally Compromised idiots, Found Family, I am so sorry, M/M, McCall Pack, Multi, Nogitsune!Stiles, Phobias, Pining, Post-3A, Suicidal Ideation, Suicide Attempts, alternate 3B, but boyd and erica are alive because fuck you jeff davis, dark!stiles, derek hale is an english major nerd, everyone is best friends and it's cute, kind of, kind of canonical in some ways, like this is such a boring slow build and i'm sorry, lydia and stiles are bffs because they're both sarcastic and obnoxious and superior, necromancer!lydia, this has some ocs but i will try not to be too obnoxious about it, this is going to be so long and i am so slow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-09
Updated: 2018-05-10
Packaged: 2018-08-20 12:13:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 22
Words: 75,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8248408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blarbles/pseuds/blarbles
Summary: Stiles is seeing shadows out of the corners of his eyes. Someone's probably trying to kill him. Oh, and he might have come back to life with a mysterious and terrifying ability to accidentally travel through dreams and hurt people. And by people, he means Derek. And by hurt, he thinks he means burn. No one's noticed anything's wrong with Stiles--no one but Derek. But Derek needs to spend some quality time with his long-lost little sister, and Stiles will be damned if he's the reason Derek stays in Beacon Hills. Stiles can handle this on his own. Right? or: a total 3b rewrite picking up right where 3a left off feat. more suffering, more pain, more pining, and more sterek, not necessarily in that order.general copyright note: none of these characters belong to me. alas!





	1. Chapter 1

Does chaos have a point,  
the unlearning that almost kills us  
before we've even had a chance  
to know it? It must be gone now,  
to let such time be spent  
choosing among forms to say it in  
beyond make it stop.  
. . .  
To live is to burn to live.

(from “Memory of Summer” by Bruce F. Murphy) 

 

Stiles knows he’s being petulant and unfair and that if their situations were reversed, he’d do the exact same thing as Derek. But he can’t seem to stop acting like a hurt six-year-old, which might be the most aggravating part of the entire situation.

“Dude, you have to at least talk to him before they leave,” Scott says.

Stiles scowls. “Really? I have no idea why you’d say that. Since when did I owe Derek Hale anything?” Scott doesn’t respond, so Stiles continues, “He’s leaving us here! You really feel like that’s okay after everything that happened? Suddenly you’re the brand new alpha in town and the old one thinks he can skip out and leave you on your own?”

Scott sighs. “I’ve told you. I’m fine. We’re all cool with this. In fact, the only one who’s not cool with it is you. And it’s getting on everyone’s nerves.”

“If it bothers you so much, why are you here?”

Scott closes his eyes, pinches the bridge of his nose with his fingers, and sighs—a gesture Stiles is not unfamiliar with, since his dad makes it almost every time Stiles opens his mouth. “Look. Just say goodbye. You’ll regret it if you don’t. Plus, he’s coming back! Jesus.” Scott turns to walk out of Stiles’ room, and then whirls back around. “And if you don’t say goodbye to him, you’re going to act like this until he comes back, and we’ll all have to kick your ass because it will be so goddamn annoying.”

Stiles resists the urge to slam the bedroom door after Scott. He only manages to stop himself because he knows Scott’s right. And because the idea of door slamming is so damn immature that it makes him want to scream. 

That doesn’t mean he’s going to take Scott’s advice, though. Just because Scott’s his alpha doesn’t mean he has to do whatever he tells him to—at least not when it comes to Derek Hale. He’s actually not sure how exactly the new alpha dynamic is supposed to work; he makes a mental note to ask Derek Hale: Werewolf Guru about it, remembers he’s pissed off at Derek, resolves to ask Deaton instead, then flops back onto the bed with his arm over his eyes and groans. 

Leave it to Derek Hale to mess up Stiles’ perfectly sound plan to never see him again and silently resent him for the rest of his life. 

The next morning, after his dad leaves for work, Stiles hears a knock on his door. He’s made coffee and now he’s cooking in his pajamas—so sue him, it’s ten o’clock in the morning on a Saturday—so he heads over to the front door, where, lo and behold, it’s his favorite scowly werewolf. Strangely, he’s holding a large cardboard box and balancing a potted plant on top of it. There’s a small cactus in a white bowl on the porch in between his feet. Also strangely, he’s not scowling—he looks slightly wary, which makes Stiles feel horrible. But he’s committed to his petulance; he can’t give up now because the cause of it happens to show up at his doorstep.

Plus, if Derek isn’t going to be his usual dramatic self, Stiles will have to assume the role. He scowls. “What?” He sounds like such an asshole that he wants to punch himself in the face.

“Hey,” Derek says. Then he shuts up and grips the cardboard box more tightly. 

Stiles has never felt more exasperated in his entire life. “Gaaaaaaaaah,” he says, and rakes his fingers through his disheveled morning hair. “Fine. Come inside, Derek.”

Derek walks inside, carefully balancing the box and the plant. Stiles picks up the small, lumpy cactus before Derek can set the box down and try to reach back for it. He shuts the door.

There’s an awkward pause before Stiles says, “Well. Here you are. You might as well have some bacon and eggs.” When Derek stares at him from under his thick eyebrows, Stiles says, “Oh my god. Put that box down. Eat. Feast. Then tell me what the hell you’re doing at my house two hours before you’re supposed to leave for the airport.” 

Derek nods and sets the box down, and Stiles places the cactus back on top of it. Then Derek eyes Stiles up and down, taking in the Captain America pajamas and Spider-man slippers. Too late, Stiles remembers he's wearing one of the many shocking aprons that he keeps accumulating in an effort to find out if it's physically possible for his dad to roll his eyes right out of his head. This one has a bottle of sriracha sauce and the words “I love cock sauce” scrawled in red cursive beneath it. "Nice look," Derek says, and actually _grins_ at him. Stiles feels the back of his neck flush bright red.

Stiles doesn’t dignify Derek with an answer. Instead, he throws up his hands, turns on his heel, and heads into the kitchen. Derek follows him, and Stiles serves him up a plate of eggs, several crispy strips of bacon, and a heaping serving of hash browns. His dad already begrudgingly ate the turkey bacon and egg whites Stiles had sautéed for him with spinach, though Stiles is sure he snuck a few bites of hash browns on the sly.

“Thanks,” Derek says, and starts eating. He takes a few bites of egg, then says, “Pass the ketchup.” He looks so adorably domestic, seated at Stiles’ barstool and crisscrossing ketchup across his plate, that some of Stiles’ exasperation eases in spite of himself. He remembers to go back to looking aggrieved as soon as he pours Derek some orange juice.

He really means to let Derek finish before he asks him about the box, but his jitteriness can’t take it, and Derek’s objective cuteness is getting on his last nerve, and it’s not like he’s ever been able to stop himself from talking at inappropriate moments before, so he says, “Oh my god. What. Do. You. Want. Derek. Why are you here?”

Derek starts munching on his bacon. “I thought you could watch my books while I’m gone,” he says.

Stiles looks from Derek to the box and back again. “Watch your books? Were they going somewhere? Growing legs and wandering away from the loft while you were gallivanting around Buenos Aires?”

“I’m not planning on doing much gallivanting on account of my still-recovering long-lost sister’s poor health,” Derek says, and Stiles is a little surprised Derek doesn’t actually punch him in the face. He’d deserve it. 

Instead, Derek says, “I don’t know, after everything that happened this summer, I thought you might need something to do besides work.”

“And what I need is to read an entire box of books?”

Maybe if he pisses Derek off enough, he’ll get annoyed with him, assume his customary scowl, and storm off, and then Stiles won’t have to feel so unbearably depressed about him leaving. Instead, Derek shrugs. “It’s just a thought. And besides, I don’t like leaving my favorite things alone while I’m gone. Anything could happen to them.”

“Anything?” Stiles says. “Something worse than me carrying your books around? I’m not exactly the world’s neatest person.”

Derek shrugs again. “Take it or leave it.” He goes back to stabbing at his eggs. 

He decides to leave off this line of questioning. For now. "Fine. What abut the plants?”

“I need someone to water them. It seemed easier to bring them over here instead of asking you to drive all the way across town once a week to deal with them until I come back. Don’t drown the cactus. And you only need to water the other one once a week or so.”

Stiles nods. Then says, trying to sound more casual than a human being has ever sounded, “So. You’re coming back?”

“Of course I’m coming back.” Derek holds his gaze for a second, and then rolls his eyes. “Jesus Christ, Stiles. Scott told you. Everyone told you.”

“Yeah, well,” says Stiles. "I just wanted to hear it from you, I guess.”

“You’re hearing it from me. I’m coming back.”

“Good,” says Stiles, hoping he doesn't actually sound as embarrassingly desperate as he thinks he did. “Cool. Alright then.”

Derek smiles at him. Then, as Derek leans back in his chair and cups his hands around the back of his head, Stiles sees it—a wide, pink burn spread across the underside of his wrist.

Derek must see Stiles’ expression change, because he tilts his chair forward again, frowning. “Do you not believe me?” he asks.

“What? No! I believe you. I do.” Derek still has a worried crease between his eyes, and Stiles jumps to reassure him, moodiness forgotten. “Just—finish your bacon and eggs before you leave. It’s not like they serve anything worth eating on a 14-hour commercial flight. And take some back for Cora, too.“ Derek still looks concerned, but he nods. Stiles smiles at him, a little tentatively, and Derek smiles back.

 

Derek does his own dishes before he leaves. After he drives away, Stiles pours himself another cup of coffee, black, and washes the remaining dishes absentmindedly, gazing into space and puzzling over Derek’s books, Derek’s smile, Derek’s scar.

It’s been four days since the three of them died. They haven’t talked about it. Of course, Stiles has been sulking in his room for most of those days, so he can’t really fault Scott or Allison for not braving his ire long enough to discuss their recent deaths. 

He thinks they’ll have to talk about it soon, though, because the night before, Stiles had woken up on fire. 

Not on-fire on fire, which, in a way, made it weirder. He’d been dreaming about dying—what else?—but in the dream, he’d burst back up through the icy water with his skin burning, hot enough that the water had sizzled to steam. 

In the dream, he’d flailed around wildly, choking on the ice in his lungs. He’d grabbed onto someone in his panic—someone standing behind him, their firm, large hands steadying him—and he could tell he’d scorched them; he’d heard their cry of pain as their skin blistered. The noise and the smell of burning skin had jolted him awake in a panic.

He’d expected to wake up like he has from his last several nights of nightmares—tangled in the sheets, gasping for breath with his dad shaking him awake. Instead, he woke up several inches above the sheets. Hovering. His hands covered in flames. 

The surprise that surged through him knocked him out of the air. He only fell about a foot, but the drop shoved all the air out of his lungs. He scrambled to sit up, holding his flame-filled hands up in front of him so they didn’t catch the sheets on fire. 

His veins felt like they were shot through with heat; something like an electrical current was running through his body, shaking him, and for a moment the shadows around his room deepened as the fire set their leering shapes dancing on the walls. But then the details from his dream started to blur in his head, his thudding heart started to slow, and he watched the flames cool from deep orange to a shockingly pale lilac. 

His hands didn’t hurt. He could see his skin through the flames—it didn’t look red or blistered or charred. Instead, the lavender flames made his hands feel cool and tingly. The erratic flickering was oddly soothing, something like staring at waves rolling on the shore. Tentatively, he wound the fire through his fingers like a skein.

When he woke up the next morning, he was sitting up in bed with his head propped on his knees and the covers pulled around his shoulders. He’d held his hands out in front of him and flexed them, cautiously. He felt the ghost of pins and needles in his fingertips, but nothing more. 

Then Derek came over to the house with his plants and his books, all disarmingly awkward and shy instead of blustery and gruff. Awkward, shy, leaving in two hours for Argentina—and with a shiny pink burn blossoming on his wrist.

As he stands in the kitchen, sipping his coffee and staring at the counter without seeing it, Stiles tries to convince himself it was a coincidence. He’d burned someone in his dream, but Derek hadn’t even been there when they’d died—he’d been with Cora. Lydia was the one who had pulled him back, so it should have been Lydia he burned, if anyone. It didn’t matter, though, he reminds himself—he can’t have burned anyone at all, not in real life, because he’d been dreaming. 

The elaborate breakfast had been meant to distract him, break the cycle of worry spinning around and around in his brain, but Derek’s quiet smile and blistering scar had torn that idea to shreds. 

He leaves the kitchen with a sigh and perches both plants on top of the box of books before he heads upstairs.

As he shoulders his bedroom door open, he thinks. Derek could have burned himself on something else. But on what? An iron? Who irons jeans and V-necks? Probably not Derek Hale, even though his clothes are usually meticulously—obnoxiously—clean. An electric kettle? Derek hates coffee and drinks only iced tea in the summer. The stove seems the most likely culprit, but Derek had obviously been hungry when he came over. Though werewolves did tend to eat more than regular humans, so maybe he’d cooked something for breakfast and was simply hungry again by the time he arrived. 

But none of those explanations make sense anyway, he remembers, because Derek’s not a weak scar-able human like Stiles, he’s a goddamn werewolf, for crying out loud. He doesn’t get injuries that don’t heal, unless there’s something seriously wrong. That burn should have healed in minutes, regardless of the source. The fact that it hasn’t suggests that it came from something more powerful than a werewolf—certainly something more powerful than Stiles. 

He could have asked Derek about it, like a normal person, but it had taken him by surprise, and he hadn’t particularly wanted to ask Derek Hale about fire. Especially not when he worried he was its source. 

Stiles sets the plants on his windowsill, assesses their placement, and then shifts the cactus closer to the window so it’s in full sunlight. He has a sudden flash of Derek awkwardly, grouchily purchasing the stumpy little cactus from the flower shop down the street and then potting it carefully in this tiny, perfect ceramic bowl.

He’s turning a molehill into a mountain—it was one weird dream, and yeah, it was pretty weird, even by his standards, and he’s still pretty freaked out by waking up above the bed and on fire, even if he can’t figure out how to bring that weird flame back and he doesn’t currently seem able to fly. So that was weird. But a scar on Derek’s wrist doesn’t necessarily mean anything. The two things don’t have to be connected. They probably aren’t. Time to worry about something else, he thinks. It’s not like he lacks other worries to focus on.

An hour later, he’s composed and deleted several apologetic, explanatory texts to Derek, who must be on the road to the airport with Cora by now, bags stacked neatly in the trunk. He’s googled “is it normal to wake up on fire after a near-death experience,” “do werewolves sometimes get scars for no reason,” “has anyone else woken up kind of floating over the bed instead of actually on the bed,” and “okay but really why are my hands on fire,” which leads him to watch the first half hour of the Chris Evans movie “Push” on Putlocker until the stream dies. He’s had two more cups of coffee. He’s swapped the cactus’s place with the spider plant’s place and back again at least three times. He’s tucked Derek’s box under the desk for safekeeping until he feels like he can trust himself to open it. And he still hasn’t succeeded in thinking about anything other than the fact that no matter how he reasons it away, there exists a slim possibility that he maybe, just maybe, he reached out for Derek Hale in a dream last night, and maybe, just maybe, the real Derek Hale woke up to the stomach-churning scent of burning flesh, the ghost of Stiles’ hand on his skin. 

He has to talk about this with someone or he’s going to explode. Derek’s driving, and he doesn’t want to talk to the rest of the pack until he’s figured out what’s going on. Probably no one wants to talk to him anyway until he’s made up for his poor behavior with brownies or something.

Deaton it is, then. He heaves himself off the bed to throw on some normal clothes and run a comb through his hair. He dry-swallows some ibuprofen to combat the headache building behind his eyes and reaches for his keys. 

He’s about to shut the bedroom door when he catches a glimpse of his reflection in the mirror out of the corner of his eye. It pulls him up short—he can swear that although he was walking towards the door, the reflection in the mirror had been stock-still.

As he turns to the mirror, confused, his image seems to make a jerky, odd little movement out of sync with his own. But he must have imagined it, because his own reflection is looking back at him, perfectly mirroring his ruffled hair and surprised eyes and rumpled shirt. He watches himself for a few seconds, raises one eyebrow and then the other and makes sure the image parallels him, then tries to shrug off his unease. He shuts the bedroom door behind him and heads down the stairs, out the front door, and to the Jeep.

 

Stiles hadn’t necessarily anticipated the nightmares, but they hadn’t surprised him either. Last night was the only night Stiles hadn’t screamed himself awake at least once. He and his dad have fallen into a routine over the last few days: when his dad wakes Stiles up from another nightmare, Stiles clings to him and his dad clings back until Stiles can fall asleep again. 

Their mornings are quiet, and they both have dark circles under their eyes, but they brush against each other quietly as they make breakfast and get ready for work.

In the months after Stiles’ mom died, he’d been left in the dark to scream by himself. Then Melissa and Scott moved in down the street, and Stiles started sneaking out at night to sleep on the floor by Scott’s bed after a nightmare woke him up, and when Melissa finally noticed she stormed over to the house, all fire and brimstone, to yell at the sheriff and then pour all of his alcohol down the drain. Stiles is surprised that his dad and Melissa became such good friends after such inauspicious beginnings.

Deaton had warned them about the aftermath, or tried to. His cryptic description of an ominously dark heart had been frightening, but at the time, a hypothetical darkness seemed a small price to pay for his dad’s life. He doesn’t regret his choice. But he’d never once thought he’d come back with some horrifying, magical ability to harm other people—to hurt Derek, to _burn _Derek Hale, for Christ’s sake.__

When he finally pulls up in front of the clinic, Stiles is relieved that Scott’s bike is absent. He’s usually here on Saturdays, but maybe Deaton gave him the day off since he’s so recently resurrected and newly alphaed and all. 

Deaton’s in the back of the clinic, and he’s not alone. He’s arguing with someone, sounding harried. The other person—Ms. Morrell, Stiles realizes—talks quietly, anger snapping the consonants at the end of her sentences. 

Stiles shuts the door behind him, and the voices cut off abruptly. Both of them are looking at him when he turns the corner into the back part of the clinic from the hallway, Morrell glaring daggers and Deaton with his typical calm expression. Stiles clears his throat, feeling awkward. “Sorry,” he says. “I should have called first, I just—“

“Not a problem, Mr. Stilinski. My sister was just leaving. Weren’t you, Marin?”

Ms. Morrell doesn’t answer. She shoots a look at Alan that would have had Stikes backing towards the door, then stalks past Stiles without looking at him. Stiles hears the front door slam shut behind her.

Deaton sighs and rubs a hand over his face. For a second, he looks more tired than Stiles has ever seen him, but when Deaton glances back at him, the look is gone. “What can I do for you, Mr. Stilinski?”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“You didn’t. We were in the middle of a disagreement. You proved a welcome reason to end a tiresome debate. How are you doing after last week?”

“Oh,” Stiles says. “Uh, fine, I guess? Considering the whole druids and death and alpha-ing and everything. I’m not, like, terrible. I just…I have a question about everything that happened,” Stiles says. “Maybe it’s stupid, but I didn’t know who else to ask, and it’s not exactly google-able.”

“Ask away,” says Deaton. He pushes the paperwork sitting in front of him to the side and gives Stiles his full attention.

Stiles clears his throat. “I feel like maybe things are different since we, you know, came back.”

“Clearly things are different, Stiles. I told you they would be. I’m afraid you’ll have to be more specific.”

“Well,” Stiles says, “like, I—I think I’m…doing things.” He takes a breath, steeling himself to say it out loud for the first time, making it real. “Maybe magic things that are affecting other people. Maybe things I couldn’t do before.” 

“Go on,” Deaton says, and Stiles explains everything that happened, starting with his odd dream, moving through the hovering and the fire and the burn on Derek’s arm.

“…but I don’t see how I could have done anything like that, right?” he asks. “I mean, I don’t know loads about werewolves, but for something to scar like that and not heal—it seems like only something really powerful could have done that, which is the opposite of what I am, obviously. So… yeah. That’s it,” he finishes lamely. 

Deaton’s still looking at him, but now his eyes are narrowed, like he’s assessing Stiles and doesn’t necessarily like what he sees. Stiles swallows nervously and, as Deaton continues to appraise him without answering, shifts back and forth from one foot to the other.

“So,” he finally says, unable to take the silence or Deaton’s scrutiny a moment longer, “I guess what I’m wondering is, is this a normal thing to have happen after, like…dying? Like on a scale of one to Jackson turning into a giant lizard that paralyzes people, how weird is this weird thing?” 

Deaton still doesn’t answer or look away. Stiles clears his throat. “I don’t want to seem like I’m overreacting, it’s just, you know…”

“I wish I could give you a clear answer,” Deaton cuts him off. “After a major traumatic event, magic can flare in unexpected ways, but you're a mediocre spark at best, Stiles. So while I can see why you’d be unsettled, I doubt it’s anything you need to be overly concerned about, and I especially doubt you could have done anything to Derek that would cause any permanent damage.”

“Okaaaaay,” says Stiles slowly. “But are you saying I could have done it, maybe? It seems like if I did, do it, I could be, you know, dangerous, and I don’t want to hurt—“ 

“Stiles,” Deaton sighs. “Has anyone ever told you that you talk to much?” He pulls the paperwork he’d shifted aside back towards him and picks up a pen.

Stiles feels stung. He tries not to let it show. “Uh, yeah. Like, incessantly, actually. But I didn’t think that—“ 

“I apologize, Stiles, but I have work to do. I think the best thing you can do is put this out of your head entirely. I wouldn’t worry about it further.”

Not worry about it further. Sure. Simple. “It’s just that…”

“Would you slide me those intake forms next to you?” Deaton asks. Stiles glances down at the scattered paper or two next to his elbow. 

“Um, sure,” he says, and moves down to grab them. As he does, the air conditioner kicks on above them. The top sheet nearly scurries out of reach, and as he grabs for it the side nicks his finger. He pushes the papers across the desk to Deaton before sticking the paper cut in his mouth. 

“Thank you,” Deaton says, and without looking back at Stiles he scans the forms with the tip of his pen. 

Stiles hopes he’s going to say something else, but Deaton stays silent as he scribbles his signature on the bottom of one sheet and flips it over. The conversation is over, apparently.

“Okay, well…thanks anyway?” Stiles says awkwardly. “Good luck with all the, um, work, I guess.” He turns to leave.

“Stiles,” Deaton calls after him when Stiles is already halfway across the room. “I’m closing early today. Seal the barrier on your way out, if you would.”

“Sure thing,” Stiles mutters. “Always happy to oblige.” 

Before he walks out the door, he flips the sign from open to closed. He locks the deadbolt behind him and murmurs a word to re-seal the ward on the door. As he does, the strong scent of sage briefly floods his senses, and he hears a sound like sand sifting from one ear to the next. When he reaches out to shove on the ward with his mind, he feels it like a solid wall, warm from the sunlight. He turns toward the car.

The wind has picked up slightly, sending up gusts of dust. As he walks up to the car, he can see his outline in the window, but it looks odd—smudged around the edges, moving asymmetrically instead of in sync with his steps. He blinks, and it’s normal again. 

He gets in the car, slams the door, and slams his hands against the steering wheel. His head hurts. He’s tired. Derek’s coming back but he’s gone, and Stiles knows—he _knows,_ no matter what Deaton says—that something’s wrong. There’s something thrumming under his skin, something dark and hot and fierce shuddering against his veins, and he doesn’t know what to do about it or what it’s going to do next. 

When he has his breath back under control, he makes himself uncurl his fingers one by one from around the steering wheel. He sinks back against the headrest and lets his desire to keep this odd, dangerous thing a secret war with the self-imposed solitude that’s starting to make his chest ache. 

Finally, he pulls out his phone. 

 

Boyd, Erica, and Isaac are all working, so only Scott, Lydia, and Allison appear as Stiles assembles the ingredients for his apology brownies. Boyd may be the resident pack chef—he’s coming over later with a slew of fancy ingredients to cook up a storm for Saturday pack movie night—but Stiles is the resident nervous baker. Brownies go better with movies than popcorn anyway.

“Finally talking to us, Stiles?” Lydia says archly as the three of them enter the kitchen. Scott’s grinning, all his annoyance from the last time Stiles saw him gone, and Allison’s holding Lydia’s hand and smiling at Stiles too. 

“Yeah, well, at least I’m an equal-opportunity shunner,” he says, breaking eggs into a ceramic bowl. “I didn’t talk to everyone equally.” 

“Have you heard from Derek at all?” Allison asks, too innocently to sound believably uninterested. 

Stiles continues cracking eggs, eyes firmly on the bowl. “Yes,” he says, “not that it’s anyone’s business.” He can practically feel the three of them exchanging a look—Lydia rolling her eyes, Scott smiling, and Allison grinning.

“Anyway,” he says, dumping the eggshells in the trash and rummaging for a whisk in the nearest drawer. “Now that I _am_ talking to everyone again, and apologizing via delicious brownies, I should add, I wanted to talk about, you know. Everything that happened, like, dying.” He grabs the vanilla and adds a few teaspoons. 

“Which part specifically?” Lydia asks. She tilts against the counter with her shoulder against Allison’s. Scott sinks into a barstool and reaches over to dip his finger in Stiles’ eggs-sugar-butter-vanilla-honey concoction. Stiles is too slow to rap him across the knuckles with his whisk.

He can feel them all exchange a look again, and this time he looks up in time to see it. It sets his jaw on edge even though he knows it’s solely his fault he’s been out of the loop for days.

“Well…” Stiles says. “I mean, for starters, maybe we should discuss this allegedly evil circle around our hearts, or whatever it’s supposed to be—dude, stop that,” he says as Scott reaches for another lick of butter. “Seriously. It’s eggs, butter, and sugar. You’ll get salmonella.”

Scott shrugs and licks the butter off his fingers anyway. Stiles sighs. The ibuprofen didn't help at all; his headache is getting worse.

“Well, I don’t feel more evil,” Allison says. “And you and Scott seem normal.”

Lydia says, “'Normal' wouldn't be my adjective of choice,” but Stiles ignores her. 

“Yeah,” he says. He moves the ceramic bowl off to the side, pulls out a kitchen knife, and starts to chop a bar of baking chocolate into pieces. “About that. What if I thought that I had maybe done something…weird…since coming back. Like, maybe not necessarily evil. Or at least not on purpose. Or like, it could be coincidence, I guess. But I feel like it’s probably not.” 

“Stiles, honestly,” Lydia says. “Use your words.”

“So I just got back from Deaton’s,” he says, and pauses. The rhythmic sound of his knife against the cutting board fills the silence while he thinks. “Well, let me start with last night.”

He launches into a description of the events of the last 24 hours. He describes the frantic, horrifying feeling of burning someone in his dream, talks about the eeriness of the flames. But when he gets to the part about Derek coming over, he stops.

“He came over to drop you off some books?” Scott says, puzzled. “And you fed him hash browns?”

“And bacon and eggs,” Stiles says, frowning into the space just beyond Scott’s ear. 

“So?” Allison prods. “Then what?”

Saying it out loud once was hard enough. They don’t need to know about the burn on Derek’s arm, he decides—not now, not until he’s certain. “Then nothing. He came over, we had breakfast, he left, and I sat around for a while, and then I went to Deaton’s, and it was kind of super weird.”

Before he can continue, Lydia asks, “What did Derek say about all this?”

“I didn’t go to Deaton’s until after he left,” Stiles says, confused, “So, nothing.”

“I mean about the fire.”

Stiles doesn’t answer.

“You didn’t tell him.” Lydia’s voice is flat.

“He was leaving for an international flight in two hours, Lydia! What was I supposed to say? ‘By the way, I spontaneously burst into flame last night. There’s probably nothing you can do about it now, so don’t worry about it, try not to be terrified of me, and have a great flight!’ He was dropping off books, for Christ’s sake, and also this tiny, cute little cactus.” 

“This conversation is so fucking weird,” Scott says. When Stiles turns to scowl at him instead of Lydia, Scott is munching on a piece of chocolate he stole while Stiles was distracted. “And that’s really something, because I’ve had, like, dozens of conversations with psychopaths in the last two weeks.”

When Stiles opens his mouth angrily to protest, Scott throws up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Hey,” he says, “I’m not accusing you. I’m just saying this is a weird conversation.” Then he smiles, and Stiles sighs. Since age six, Stiles has never once been able to keep arguing once Scott’s completely genuine, completely cheerful smile is in play.

“Anyway,” Stiles says, deciding to ignore Lydia’s glare and turning back to his chocolate. “I tried to talk to Deaton about it, but he made it sound like I was totally imagining things. I mean, at first he kind of acknowledged that I’d done something weird, and then he was all like, ‘don’t worry about it, Stiles! You’re being so dramatic and I have serious work to do! Leave immediately!’” 

“That doesn’t sound like Deaton,” Allison says. “He’s usually pretty smart and helpful.”

“Yeah, well, not this time,” Stiles says. He starts to scrape the chocolate into his double boiler, which is already filled with water and seated on the stovetop. At least he knows these apology brownies are going to be amazing, he thinks, and—aha. The thought comes to him suddenly: apology books. That's what they are, at least in part. Derek leaving a bit of himself behind for Stiles to keep safe. He smiles to himself. 

When he refocuses on the conversation, Scott is saying, “I mean, if Alan says you don’t have to worry about it, then maybe you don’t have to worry about it.” 

“I don’t know,” Lydia says, slowly but crisply, in the way that means she’s thinking through something. “I’ve actually never heard of something like that happening—well, not exactly like that, anyway. It’s worth looking into more. He was arguing with Morrell before you came in?” 

“Yeah, but I couldn’t tell what about,” Stiles says. “She sounded super pissed off, though, whatever it was.”

There’s an uneasy silence that Stiles, for once, doesn’t know how to fill. 

“Your chocolate’s smoking,” Allison points out, and Stiles swears and pulls the pot off the heat. 

“I guess it’s probably nothing,” Stiles says, his stomach sinking. He can try not worrying about it if everyone agrees he shouldn’t, but he’s not sure how. 

“It’s not nothing if it’s bothering you so much, Stiles,” Allison says. “You could try talking to him about it again, and,” probably seeing uncertainty flash across his face, “we could come with you. Maybe that will make it less weird.” 

“Let’s go on Monday?” Scott says. “We’ll definitely come with you, dude.”

Lydia sighs but doesn’t say anything in disagreement, which, coming from her, signals that she’ll come along too.

“Okay,” Stiles says, trying not to show that a fist clenched tight around his lungs has loosened its grip. “If you want.” He continues to stir.

There’s a brief silence. Then, “Don’t forget to preheat the oven,” Allison says. 

“Thanks. I don't know why I always forget,” Stiles says. When he turns back to face them, they’re not looking him with the wariness he’d braced for. Which is just as well, he thinks, attempting to ignore his relief. Like Deaton said, like Scott said, maybe there’s nothing to worry about. 

He looks away from the shadows cast by the trees against the wall, ignores the way they dance in and out of his sight. Ignores how his skin hums with the scorching pins and needles that haven't left his fingertips all day. Suppresses the jitteriness in his stomach Derek’s smile left behind and the way his slanted reflection in the microwave over the stove seems to smirk at him. 

No. Nothing to worry about at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this started out as a short story that devolved into a novel. I am so sorry. Basically, this takes place directly after season 3a, and it's just a total rewrite of season 3b. In this world, all werewolves shift into straight-up wolves a la Mercy Thompson. I also changed the timing of some events (for instance, I moved 3a to summer so most of it it doesn't happen during the school year). I'm v e r y slow. For the two of you who end up reading this, you have my heartfelt apologies.
> 
> soundtrack for this chapter: "Meet Me in the Woods," Lord Huron


	2. Chapter 2

Derek had expected Argentina to be warm. It isn’t, and he feels incredibly stupid. The winter air is a brisk fifty-two degrees. In spite of the temperature, he wouldn’t be cold, even without his long-sleeved shirt. But he’s glad he wore it; the worn fabric is the color of Stiles’ favorite hoodie and reminds him of home. 

Derek had grabbed the luggage from the carousel while Cora talked to someone about renting a car. Now, she’s reaching out for one of the bags he’s holding, dangling the car keys from her finger. “Ready?” she asks, popping her gum.

He reaches out to take the keys. “I’m driving.” 

She hops out of his reach. “Nuh uh. The whole time I was in Beacon Hills you drove me around in that shitty emo garbage car of yours. I’m from here and I know where we’re going so I’m driving. Plus we’re both under 26, so it’s extra insurance either way.” She grins. “Or you can drive 200 miles to San Clemente using nothing but Google Maps and your internal compass, with little to no help from moi.”

Derek gives her an appraising look. She’s panting, and a sheen of sweat coats her forehead in spite of the chill. She’s running a slight temperature, and her clamminess makes him anxious. But she looks happy to be here—she’s smiling, genuinely, teasingly, in the way that he remembers from when they were little. So he gives in.

“Fine. But if anything happens to that car, I won’t rest until you pay back literally every cent. You hear me?”

“Loud and clear,” Cora says, and gives him a mock salute. He smiles to himself as he follows her to the rental car, each of them with a bag in hand. 

Derek wouldn’t exactly call himself a people person, so he can’t say he’s not anxious about meeting Cora’s pack. He has a lot to be grateful to them for—the Medina pack saved Cora from the hunters who, working with Kate, snatched her from Beacon Hills and trafficked her to South America as part of a wolf-fighting ring. 

At the time, the Medinas had been working with their closest neighbors, the Aguirre pack, to find the hunters and their ring after they kidnapped the Aguirre alpha’s son. The boy was dead by the time the packs got there. All Derek knew about it was that Cora had seen his death and that she didn’t want to talk about it, and that she was the only wolf without a home to go back to after the Aguirres and Medinas had taken out the hunters. She was ten. The hunters told her that her entire family as dead. So the Medinas took her in, and she’d been a member of their pack—and their family—ever since.

Before they leave the airport and head off down the road, Cora steals Derek’s old-school iPod and scrolls through the artists until she settles on INXS. One of his favorites. They drive without talking for a while, “Suicide Blonde” and “Elegantly Wasted” blaring through the speakers. But once they fight their way out of the city traffic, Cora clears her throat and turns down the music. Derek absently rubs at the burn on his wrist, trying to settle the butterflies blooming in his stomach. 

“So,” she says, “Is pineapple still your favorite food?”

Derek’s not sure what he expected her to say, but it wasn’t that. They haven’t had time to talk about anything normal—it’s all been fights and stopped hearts and demented druids since she showed up at the loft. He hears a voice in his head that sounds suspiciously like Stiles whisper that he has to stop expecting the first thing out of anyone’s mouth to be an accusation. 

“I think it’s peaches, now, actually.” He’s embarrassingly pleased that she remembered that fruits had always been his favorite foods. 

“Mine’s oranges and grapes,” she says, which surprises him a little, though it’s not like a 17-year-old’s favorite food would be the pizza topped with skittles she loved when she was three. He remembers several loud fights between Cora and his dad, who spent many a dinnertime trying to cajole her into eating something healthy. He’d usually settle for her eating the pizza without the skittles.

“Oranges are fine,” Derek says.

“Wait until you try the ones down here,” Cora says. “Even better than in California.”

“Remember that peach tea Mom used to make?” Derek says. She served it during their summertime family gatherings and pack picnics on the lawn in front of the cabin, rambunctious kids shrieking as they chased each other around in circles, adults chatting and fixing food. He remembers the sound of crickets swelling as the sun sank lower in the sky and bats swooped overhead. 

“We always had lemonade at the kids’ table,” Cora says. “It’s still my favorite drink.”

“I drink a lot of Snapple,” Derek says. “But I’ve never found anything that tastes exactly like hers. Something about the combination of teas she used.” 

“Laura didn’t have the recipe?”

“No,” he says, and looks out the window, watching the road churn past. “I mean, maybe she did. But we didn’t talk about it.” He means much more than the peach tea recipe.

“What did you talk about instead?”

Their loss was too raw, too big. They’d moved to New York—as far away as they could get from California—and tiptoed around it for years, talked about Derek’s classes at the local high school and then, after a few years, classes during his one and only year at Columbia, and about Cora’s clients at work. He remembers nights around their battered secondhand coffee table, playing hearts and crazy eights and an old Garfield deck of Old Maid they found at a thrift store. Cozy weeknights of him sitting at the table doing his homework, Laura curled up on the couch skimming through the books he already read for class. 

On the weekends, they’d order in and watch movies together—Derek chose on Fridays, Laura on Saturdays. 

“We watched An American Werewolf in Paris a lot,” Derek says. 

“The shitty 80s movie? Are you serious?”

“Over and over and over. She loved it.”

“What else did she love?”

“Shakespeare movies. Orange juice with pulp. Twin Peaks. Blood sausage. Yard sale bargains. Harry Potter. Black coffee, like Stiles.” He smiles, remembering. “Editing my college essays when she thought I wasn’t looking.” 

“I wish,” Cora says, and stops. 

She doesn’t finish the sentence. It doesn’t matter. Derek knows what she’s going to say.

 

By the time they arrive, it’s late afternoon. Cora had warned him that no matter what time it was when they finally got to the house, he should expect an hours-long welcoming party. When they pull up, he can tell that she’s right—the entire house is lit up like a beacon with light spilling from every window. The house seems even brighter because it’s so isolated. It’s located outside San Clemente del Tuyu proper, against a lonely stretch of beach where there’s enough room for the pack to stretch their legs.

He can hear the thrum of music and the chatter of people—lots of people—talking. Cora had let Derek practice his rusty Spanish during the rest of the car ride, but his nervousness dispels the tiredness that dragged at his eyelids on the last legs of their drive. 

Not for the first time since they landed, Derek wishes Stiles was here. Stiles would have no trouble meeting everyone, talking brightly as he flitted around the room from conversation to conversation, making everyone feel at home even though he was the guest. Derek gives himself a second to think about how people are drawn to him, like moths to a shining flame. How he illuminates everything he touches. 

Cora turns off the car, and the sighing engine snaps him back to the present. He knows she can hear his accelerating heartbeat, but he doesn’t look at her until she puts a reassuring hand on his arm. Her touch still makes him jump; after so long apart from any family members (Peter, as always, not included in his list of family), the sensation is foreign. 

“Hey,” she says. “You're fine. They’re going to love you.”

Derek can’t manage more than a grin that comes out more like a grimace, but her full smile makes him resolve to try. He follows her out of the car, shuts the door behind him, and snags their bags from the trunk before heading through the open door. 

 

Luisa, Luciano, and the rest of the pack are everything Cora has described them as and more. Even though she only looks about ten years older than him, Luisa is warm and motherly from the second she sees Derek. She pulls him into a hug, kisses him twice on both cheeks, and tells him how happy she is to welcome Cora’s brother to her home. Her deep brown eyes sparkle at him, and her curly, dark hair cascades down her back and bounces when she turns to wrap Cora in a hug. 

Luciano, her husband and the Medina alpha’s oldest son, is similarly friendly. He asks Derek about his flight and listens attentively to Derek’s poorly conjugated responses even with two small kids dangling from his arms and clamoring for attention.

After she hugs and kisses Luisa and Luciano, Cora is greeted with excited cheers from the hoard of children in the main room. The couple have four kids, all of them under nine—Flora’s the oldest, then Santiago, Bianca, and Benjamin. Also included in the throng are Lucien’s sister Camila, who’s here with her wife and their twins, Mia and Matias; his brother Tomas and his fiancée with their kids Rosario and Lauturo; his brother Emanuel and his boyfriend; his sister Ana and her daughter Catalina; and his parents, Gabriel and Teresa. Gabriel is the alpha. Derek thinks there are a few members of the Aguirre pack among the crowd, but he’s having enough difficulty keeping track of the varied Medinas as it is.

Some of the kids are werewolves, some are witches or sparks, some are strictly human, but they all play together in a shrieking mass with Cora at the center of their whirlwind. He thinks there are a few more werewolf kids than human ones, and most of the adults are either werewolves or witches. The jumbled, happy mix reminds him so strongly of his childhood pack that he has to take a deep breath through the pain that spears his ribcage.

Cora smiles at him over the heads of the kids, and he settles back into himself. Rubs at the scar on his wrist absentmindedly and decides to head into the kitchen to see how he can help.

Everyone does their best to make him feel welcome. Over dinner, he talks mostly to Luciano, who studied Chicano literature at the University of Arizona. Laura died at the start of his second year at Columbia, and talking to Luciano, who teaches grammar and literature at the local secondary school, reminds him with a pang of the life he wanted—still wants—for himself. It also makes him feel a little less alone.

The ramshackle house has had enough rooms added to it over the years to fit everyone in the pack and then some. Parents (or aunts or uncles—whoever’s the closest when a child’s tired screaming starts) tuck kids into bed throughout the evening; even the ones who no longer live in the pack house are all staying the night, and probably for the next few days, all part of Cora’s welcome-home committee. 

At some point, Derek finds himself in a corner with Benjamin, Luz and Luisa’s two year old, who against all odds has managed to dodge parents and avoid the tiredness-induced meltdowns that sent so many of his siblings and cousins to bed. He’s carefully stacking blocks on top of each other, occasionally handing one to Derek with exceptional solemnity. Derek places the block in the stack and waits for Benjamin to nod his confirmation at the placement before removing his hand.

It takes Derek a while to realize that Gabriel is sitting beside the two of them. He’s not sure how long he’s been there; Gabriel moves with a quietness Derek would expect in a seasoned alpha but that surprises him in a 70-year-old man. Which, he thinks, goes to show how few alphas Derek knows who have survived to 70. He tries not to think of Scott. 

In silence, the two men watch Benjamin stack blocks. Finally, Gabriel says, “I hope you know how much we love Cora.”

"I know,” he says in his awkward Spanish. “I’m—“ He breaks off, not sure how to continue. “I’m grateful. This is the kind of life I would have wanted for her. It’s the kind of life we used to have. I’ll never stop being grateful.”

Gabriel says, “I’m sorry you didn’t get to see her grow up.”

“Thank you,” he says through the lump in his throat, and Gabriel stands up.

“Time for bed, mijo,” he tells Benjamin, who is starting to droop among his many blocks. Derek expects him protest. Instead, he nuzzles against his grandpa and lets himself be carried off to bed.

 

Cora soon comes to shuffle Derek off to bed too; she must have seen him struggling to keep his eyes open from across the room. 

“Come on, sleepyhead,” she tells him, and grabs his hand to lead him to his guest room. They have to go out the back door and circle around to the side of the house to reach it, since it’s tacked on to the rest of the house without a connecting interior door. The room is the quietest and most secluded in the house, which he’s grateful for. He feels ragged at the edges.

“Are you going to bed?” he asks her.

“Soon,” she says. Her eyes are bright with excitement and happiness, not so much with fever, which pleases him. Then, to his surprise, she pops up on her toes and kisses him on the cheek. “I love you, you weirdo,” she says. “Thanks for coming with me.” And then she’s off, back to chat with whichever adults are still awake.

Derek closes the door behind her. Someone had brought his bag around and set it on the twin bed. When not occupied by visiting pack members, this room seems to function as a library; stacks of paperbacks on the floor and hardbacks overflowing the makeshift shelves on the walls make Derek feel perfectly, surprisingly at home.

Without turning on the rusty lamp next to the door, he crosses the room and pulls open the one small window. Waves crash in the distance, the tide almost in. He rests his head briefly on the cool windowsill and lets the breeze ruffle his hair. It’s only midnight even though it feels like three a.m. He's too tired to count how much he’s slept over the past day of travel—no more than a few hours of sleep on the flight. 

Before he goes to bed, he pulls his phone out of his bag. He hadn’t turned it on after they’d landed for a few reasons. One was that he’d worried if he’d turned it on, he wouldn’t be able to focus on Cora and meeting her pack. Another was that he’d worried no one in Beacon Hills had missed him enough to text. Well. One person in particular.

He knows he doesn’t need to worry—why would Stiles be so mad about him leaving if he didn’t care, at least a little? But he knows Stiles is pissed at him for leaving, and also that Stiles isn't necessarily pissed—more like hurt. He’d just died, after all. Stiles had a right to want familiarity and resist change. 

Derek also knows he had the right or familial duty or whatever to go with Cora and that he doesn’t have to feel bad. He feels bad anyway. 

He takes a breath and turns the phone on.

The service out here isn’t the greatest, so the messages take a while to trickle in. He has a few snapchats from Allison and Lydia saying they hope he had a safe flight and showcasing the perfect August weather back in Beacon Hills. There’s a text from Scott, asking if Derek can call sometime the next morning, but nothing urgent, and that he hopes Derek and Cora got to San Clemente del Tuyu safely, and that he’s happy to help Derek practice his Spanish whenever he needs to. Then there are the texts from Stiles. All 189 of them.

He scrolls through them one by one, letting himself savor each bizarre message. He doesn’t like to admit to himself how relieved he is to see them, even though it looks like Stiles hasn’t slept much more than Derek has since Saturday morning. 

His most recent text from Stiles was sent about ten minutes ago and reads, “what does ur new room look like? cozier than the loft hopefully??? no weird industrial decor etc etc?????” 

Derek smiles and flips on the light. He takes a picture of the bookshelves and sends it. Then he types, “Go to bed, Stiles.” Sends it. Texts, “Good night.” And he finally lets himself slip into sleep.

 

He’d been too tired to worry much about the dream. He’d hoped it had been a one-time thing anyway, that traveling would shake it loose and he’d settle back into more familiar nightmares. 

He was wrong. It sneaks up on him just as daylight starts to seep through the thin muslin curtain over the window.

He’s walking through the preserve. It’s fall; leaves feather the trail in front of him. He tucks his hands into his pockets. 

Around a curve in the trail, he sees a shadow hunched over in an odd position. Derek is alarmed at first, and he can feel his wolf’s hackles rise, but the shape gradually resolves itself into Stiles and Derek relaxes. 

He draws closer, reaches for Stiles’ shoulder. But Stiles jerks around before Derek can touch him, and Derek steps back involuntarily. There’s something horribly wrong with Stiles’ eyes—the darkness at the center is swelling, gradually swallowing up his iris and the whites of his eyes until they’re totally black. Dark liquid—viscous, like ink—starts to spill over the edges of his eyes and course down his face.

“Help me, Derek,” Stiles whispers. Stiles takes a jerky step towards him, his movements all wrong, and Derek’s wolf realizes before he does that it looks like Stiles, sounds like Stiles, but it’s not Stiles. It’s something else. 

“Help me,” not-Stiles says again with a rising note a panic in his voice. Derek knows he shouldn’t, knows it’s not really Stiles, but he can’t help himself. He reaches towards Stiles, and the not-Stiles throws a hand around Derek’s wrist. Steam rises from Stiles’ fingers where they curl around Derek’s skin. He cries out in spite of himself. 

He doesn’t know what to do, wants to lift his other hand to scrub the black liquid from Stiles’ face, but Stiles whispers, in a voice that is so _Stiles,_ “Please,” and Derek lurches back into consciousness. He grabs at his wrist. The previously shiny, pink skin is newly blistered, and a faint wisp of steam curls up from the scar.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> song for this chapter: Mess Is Mine, Vance Joy


	3. Chapter 3

Stiles’ Sunday quickly takes on the oppressively drab, yellow hue unique to listless summer days. The summer heat drags his feet as he ambles from bedroom to kitchen, kitchen to shower, shower to bedroom, bedroom to couch, where he finally settles with a sigh, turning his phone over in his hands. He’s been using it to text Derek whenever he feels bored. So far this morning, that's been every thirty seconds.

It hadn’t occurred to him that he’d ever miss Derek’s terse texts in response to his own snarky, long-winded messages, or Derek’s texts telling Stiles to convey some mundane piece of information to Scott even though Derek has his number, or Derek’s texts with a thousand indecipherably autocorrected words even though Stiles has explained a million times the importance of checking your texts before you send them. 

When his dad leaves to catch up on paperwork in his air conditioned office, he ruffles Stiles’ hair on his way out the door in a way he hadn’t since Stiles was about six years old. Stiles snipes at him, but he doesn’t bother to hide the smile on his face. The door clicks shut, and Stiles is alone with his thoughts.

While Derek and Cora flew above the continent last night, he’d dreamed his dad sinking into the deep, rich earth beneath the tree, his face already fixed and rigid with death. Stiles had woken to his dad leaning over him, shaking him awake while he choked on the thick taste of loam. 

When he’d reached out instinctively to grab his dad, needing to touch him to know he was really there, really alive, Stile’ skin hadn’t been flushed within anything but fear. No heat or fire, no skin sizzling with flame, no blisters left on his dad’s skin after he’d clutched Stiles close and let him gasp away his panic.

He wants to talk to Lydia about it, or Scott, but the wolves are up at the preserve. Like his mom, Derek had set aside one day a week for all of the wolves to spend time just with each other, learning to move as a pack. The wolves came out of the woods jostling each other with their shoulders, shadowboxing or roughhousing playfully. Even Isaac reappeared with an unironic smile, willing to let the others brush against him, and Derek’s stance always lost some of its customary tension. Their easy camaraderie gave Stiles a guiltily selfish pang of envy.

Stiles, Allison, and Lydia usually hung out on Sundays—shopping, lounging at the pool, seeing a movie, sometimes getting up early to drive out to San Francisco to visit a museum or farmer’s market—but school starts in two weeks, and Allison and Lydia are spending every spare second together. 

There probably won’t be anyone to talk to if he walks down to the coffee shop, but there will be coffee and air conditioning instead of a rickety ceiling fan. But walking all the way down there in the heat sounds like too much work. So does reaching for the remote, and so does turning on the PlayStation to play Dragon Age, and so does scouring the channels for something worth watching, and, after a while, so does even grabbing his phone to text Derek something obnoxious. 

He stares blankly at the ceiling, watching the fan’s blades whir until they lull him into a sort of doze. He starts to feel the warm, heavy feeling of slipping into sleep. The warmth’s gentle in his veins, quiet at first like spring rain. Then it rises, courses, seethes under his skin until, all at once, he feels it’s going to boil over. 

He jolts upright, arms stretched out in front of him, positive he’ll look down to see them coated in flames. But there’s nothing to see, only the sensation of power building like a wave against a levee that threatens to drown him in fire, a surging sensation that could—

Stiles lurches to his feet and stumbles towards the front door. Slams it behind him, shoves both hands into his pockets. He walks briskly, ignoring the sensation of fiery pins and needles flooding his body, trying to slough it off like he would an old jacket. 

The heat thrums on, undeterred. He switches tactics and tries to picture his thoughts as dead leaves slipping from a tree, the way one of his therapists had encouraged him to do when he was small years ago and his head would fill up with so many words he thought his brain would explode. He can only imagine a trail of smoldering leaves behind him on the sidewalk, their edges bright with flame.

The coffee shop is cool and calm. Sean, Erica’s oldest half-brother and one of Stiles’ two co-workers, is the only one on shift today. He winks at Stiles as he slides the 24-ounce iced dark roast across the counter and lets him pay half price, more than the discount employees are supposed to get. 

Stiles takes the drink and walks to his favorite chair, the overstuffed, ragged, faded-plaid one in the used book corner. Celeste, the owner, lets customers buy one for a dollar, or they can leave a book and take a book. The shelves overflow with oddities.

He sits. Presses the drink against his forehead and closes his eyes. Usually the smell of incense in the shop makes it feel homey, but today it agitates his headache. 

What's wrong with him? He definitely didn’t imagine that feeling, which dissipates as he sips his coffee, but he doesn’t know how to explain it either. Miserably, his skin still itching, he thinks, _I want to talk to someone about this, right now._ And he lets himself think, _Derek. I wish Derek were here._

He takes small sips of coffee to settle his stomach, but the tension keeps building in his head. Maybe that’s why it takes him an embarrassingly long amount of time staring blankly at the books slumped on the peeling white bookshelves to remember that he does have a task to occupy his boring day with after all. 

 

Stiles hasn’t yet moved the box of apology books from under the desk, which is settled under the mirror. He pauses at his room’s threshold, then walks decisively towards the bed and yanks his battered old quilt off of it. Without looking straight at the mirror, he flings the blanket over it. He sets his coffee on the desk and carefully slides the box out. 

The books are packed with their spines down, pages facing up, each book nestled neatly against the other. Judging from the top layer, they’re mostly paperbacks. As he unpacks the box one book at a time, turning each over in his hands, he can hardly tell that anyone has read these books even once, let alone the dozens of times he knows Derek must have. Stiles’ favorite books are battle-scarred and tattered from being carried everywhere and read to pieces. Derek’s favorite books are so perfectly preserved that just looking at them he feels like he’s walking through a museum or an art gallery.

Some of the books that Derek must have read in of college have perfectly even highlights and minuscule notes written in the margins. But the books aren’t dog-eared or inscribed with their owner’s name. In fact, the only books that look anything less than the perfect are the third Harry Potter book, which has a small tear on the cover, and some book called The Crossing, which actually has a creased spine. 

Stiles sorts them into three piles: books he’s read, books he’s heard of but hasn’t read, and books he’s never heard of. For a moment, he’s too afraid to touch them. Then he tentatively reaches for the book on top of last pile—a collection of short stories by Jorge Luis Borges. The cover has a strange spiral and is the exact shade of blue as Derek’s eyes. 

He flops onto a patch of sunlight in the middle of his bed and thumbs through the book until he finds a story with the most highlighting and the largest number of tiny notes clustered in the margins. He starts to read.

 

Stiles wakes with a start on Monday morning and scrambles for his phone on the bedside table, misses it and bangs his elbow on the nightstand, and snatches the phone out of the air as it tumbles towards the ground. At first he thinks the clock reads ten, but then he blinks and it resolves into a six. After a few bleary seconds, he realizes he automatically translated the hour into Argentina time. 

The night’s events come back to him in a rush. He yelps and drops the phone, holding his hands out in front of his face. 

He’d gone to bed a few hours after getting that text from Derek, but he hadn’t been asleep for long. In this dream, he’d being lying on the floor of the police station reliving the hellish night with Matt and the kanima. He’d reached over to grab Derek by the wrist right before they both toppled to the ground, and he couldn’t let go even when he heard the sick smell of burning skin and Derek’s hiss of pain. Stiles had been frantic, going out of his mind, trying to pull away but frozen in place by the poison, unable to scream. 

He only woke up when Matt appeared, clutching a dagger in one hand and grinning down at him with his teeth bared. Stiles had jolted awake right before the dagger struck home in the center of his chest, to find his skin vibrating with that sensation of power and his open palms full of flame. He slammed back down into the bed he was, apparently, floating above again. 

Most of the rest of the night passed with his knees curled against his chest and his stomach full of some strange combination of fear and fascination while he stared at the flames, which were a brilliant violet this time instead of the calmer, paler shade of purple from two nights before. 

The smell of chlorine that always accompanied Stiles’ dream version of Matt didn’t leave the room until Stiles was too tired to resist sleep. The last thing he remembers is the flames dying to the color and intensity of a gas burner set on low. 

Now, the flames are gone, and he doesn’t remember having any dreams in the last hour. But after a second dream where he’d actually seen Derek and knew for a fact that he’d hurt him, he can’t handle not knowing if something happened to Derek last night too. Something worse than the first time, even; last night’s dream had dragged on for what seemed like an eternity. 

He opens his inbox to text Derek, but he pauses. Instead, taking a breath and trying to muster a firm sense of resolve, he dials his number. He’ll ask Derek about it this time. He will.

Derek answers on the second ring. “Hey,” he says, a little out of breath.

He doesn’t sound surprised or annoyed, which seems like a good sign coming from someone Stiles has spent the last 48 hours spamming with obnoxious texts. “Hey, uh, hi,” Stiles says back. “How was your flight?”

“Good. Wait,” Derek asks, “what are you doing up? Isn’t it like five in the morning?”

“I’ve been known to get up early,” Stiles says, affronted.

“No. You haven't.”

“Whatever. For your information, it’s six, not five. And I couldn’t sleep. Are you going to tell me how your flight was or not? And why you sound all like, sweaty?” he asks.

“I went on a run,” says Derek. “It’s brisk, but the ocean’s nice. Lots of sand dunes. And the flight was fine,” he says, before Stiles can interrupt him to ask about it a third time. “Just fine, Stiles.”

 _Speaking of sleeping, did you have some super weird dreams last night, and possibly wake up with your wrist all burned to hell?_ “Did they bring you a million cups of coffee and hand out little morning towels and give you food and stuff?” 

“They did. The coffee was disgusting.”

“You hate coffee,” Stiles says, and surprises himself by sounding more fond than scornful. “Did you get any sleep?”

“Cora did. I mostly read.”

“She’s feeling okay?” 

“Actually, I think she is,” and he sounds nearly happy, which makes Stiles feel even guiltier about being a brat. 

“What about you?” Stiles says, trying to sound normal and keep his heartbeat from accelerating. He hopes he at least succeeds with the first part—not that it matters much, since Derek can definitely hear the second part. “Are you…feeling okay?”

“I’m fine,” Derek says, so sincerely that Stiles lets out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. “The weather’s cold, the pack is nice, and I think I’m sleeping in the library, so everything’s…kind of perfect.” 

Derek’s tone of surprise when something goes right always makes Stiles’ chest hurt. _Ask him. Ask him now._ But Derek brought up libraries, so Stiles says, “Oh, hey, I got super bored yesterday and started reading your books. Is that cool?”

“Are you asking if it’s cool that you read a book from the box of books I gave you and explicitly told you to read?” 

“Oh. Yeah. Stupid question,” Stiles says. “Anyway, I’ll try to be careful with them.”

“Did you like the ones you read?” Derek asks.

“Yeah, I think so. I started with these super weird short stories. I can’t remember who they were by, but they were translated from Spanish.”

“Borges,” Derek says. “He’s Argentine.”

“That’s the one.”

“Did you like them?” Derek says. “The stories you read?”

“Yeah, my favorite one was called, uh, something about a garden?”

“’The Garden of Forking Paths,’” Derek says.

“Right, right. It was weird, but I think I liked it.” In fact, he still has the Borges collection open on his desk to a passage Derek had underlined, starred, and highlighted. Stiles had flipped back to the paragraph and read and reread it after finishing the story: “From that moment on, I felt about me and within my dark body an invisible, intangible swarming. Not the swarming of the divergent, parallel and finally coalescent armies, but a more inaccessible, more intimate agitation that they in some manner prefigured.”

“Thanks,” he says, meaning thanks for the entire thing—the distraction that saved him from a day of twitchy anxiety, that the books were an apology he didn’t deserve and that Derek shouldn’t have felt the need to offer. “You were right. I needed a distraction.”

“I assumed texting me was your full-time distraction from now on,” Derek says. “Based on the hundred-plus texts you sent me yesterday. Giving you the books was overkill.”

“Nah, each text only takes, like, three seconds. Plus, multi-tasking, duh. Text while you read.”

Stiles can feel Derek rolling his eyes at the thought of someone failing to devote their full attention to a book, but instead of berating him, Derek asks, “What else have you all been up to?” Even with his regular human hearing, Stiles can hear Derek kick off his tennis shoes and flop onto a bed with squeaky mattress springs. “Not that I believe you’ve had time to do anything besides text me for the last two days.”

“Good thing I’m an accomplished multi-tasker,” Stiles says smugly, and launches into a description of Saturday pack movie night, which had featured Stiles’ apology brownies, Boyd’s outstanding cooking, a lively debate about the most beautiful and accomplished ice skaters in Olympic history (Michelle Kwan and Surya Bonaly were the finalists), and a rowdy viewing of Fast Five. 

“Boyd texted me about it. He said the brownies were good,” Derek says.

“Really?” says Stiles, surprised and pleased. Stiles is a fine cook, but Boyd—who, after all, had made a pork roast with a cherry-maple glaze and horseradish-garlic mashed potatoes last night and considered the recipe low on his list of challenging meals—has incredibly high standards.

“What’s your secret ingredient?” Derek asks. 

“Vanilla bean paste,” Stiles says. “And a tiny bit of honey. And really, really, absurdly dark chocolate and a hint of lavender. But I also have a caramel and sea salt recipe I found the other day, and there’s the espresso ones I made a few weeks ago, or I’ve done these mint ones that are actually good instead of tasting like they’re covered in toothpaste, and I could…I could make some for you sometime, if you want.”

“Which ones? You just listed four recipes.”

“Oh. Any kind. I meant I could make you apology brownies.” He takes a breath, suddenly feeling like some dam is about to break and the words he’s hidden behind his teeth are about to spill out—sorry he was such a dick, he’s worried about Cora and guilty that she got poisoned in the first place, he didn’t mean to be so petulant, he was only petulant because he realized exactly how much he’d miss Derek and didn’t know how to deal with that particular piece of information, and he feels this lurching, sinking sensation in his gut every time he remembers those fucking _dreams,_ the ones where he’s somehow granted the power to torture Derek using the thing Derek fears the most. "Derek..."

But Derek cuts him off. “Stiles, you already made me apology bacon. That counts for something.”

“Does it though?” Stiles says. “I mean, yeah, it was good bacon, but it wasn’t the best bacon in the world, and it wasn’t even the best brand of bacon, I had to go to Target and they didn’t have the kind I like, and—“ 

“Stiles,” Derek says again. Then, after a pause, “Ask me about my day."

Stiles hesitates. Feels the words that threatened to spill over settle back into the curve of his throat. ”Okay,” he says. “How was your day?”

What follow are more words than he thinks he’s ever heard Derek Hale: King of the Monosyllable say in one sitting in his life. 

Derek tells him that he’s not as anxious about Cora as he was, that she’s not as pale and that her fever’s dropped a degree. He tells him he was worried about meeting the pack, but that the alpha’s oldest son loves reading as much as he does and everyone went out of their way to make him feel at home and only smothered him a little bit. He tells him about the kid he clearly likes the best, Benjamin. He talks about the oranges he had for breakfast and the way the mist rolled off the sea last night and filled the dunes with fog that’s only just starting to burn off.

As Derek talks, the nerves jumping in Stiles’ stomach still. Derek sounds fine, actually—not speaking in his typical terse one-word responses, his tone measured and calm. He doesn’t sound lonesome, like Stiles worried he would be. And then, the longer Derek talks, the more Stiles wonders if maybe, possibly, Derek might him not mind talking to him. Might even (he thinks with a lightheaded feeling suspiciously like hope) miss him, just a bit. 

Derek pads to the window and opens it, and Stiles hears the waves slapping the sand. Suddenly, the alarm on Stiles’ phone goes off and makes him jump. “Oh shit,” he says, pulling the phone from his ear to check the time. “Oh shit, I have to be at the coffee shop in like, twenty minutes.”

“You set your alarm for twenty minutes before--never mind. Of course you do.”

“Goddammit.” Stiles runs a hand over his face, hearing Lydia’s exasperated sigh. He hadn’t brought up one facet of everything he’d resolved to finally confess. 

“It’s fine. Go to work,” Derek says. “I should shower anyway.”

For reasons he doesn’t care to explain, all the blood rushes to Stiles’ face. “Um,” he says. “Yes. Can I call you back later? Or, I mean, I don’t have to, if you're busy.” 

“So you’d go back to texting obsessively? No. Just call, Stiles,” Derek says.

“Alright,” Stiles says. “Talk to you later, then.” And he hangs up, heart in his throat, before confessions of any type can slip out of his mouth.

 

By the time his ten o’clock shift starts, the café has wound down from its early morning rush, and Stiles can make the regulars what they want without thinking too hard about it. The time passes slowly, and he occupies himself by thinking exactly how he’s going to phrase things when he calls Derek back. 

_Derek, hey, so like I’m glad you’re having a great time or whatever, but, random question, are you having these bizarre nightmares about me and waking up, I don’t know, all burned and shit?_

_Derek, hey, thanks for letting me babysit your books, but also, do I keep hurting you in your dreams via your biggest fear, aka fire? ___

__

__

_Hi Derek, it’s me, Stiles. You probably already knew this because of caller ID. So this weird freaky shit’s been happening to me and also maybe to you and I was wondering if you keep seeing me in your dreams, but in a creepy way, not, like, a sexy way, obviously._

He makes a noise of frustration. How could words fail him at a time like this? He wants to bang his head against the cash register, but he thinks the woman whose drink he just made—Gillian, 20-ounce dirty chai, hot, almond milk instead of 2%—would probably look at him weird. Or weirder than she already is. He sighs and swipes her card. 

When his four hours are up, Stiles hangs up his apron in kitchen that passes for the break room. He means to keep his eyes down while washing his hands in the sink, but he accidentally glances up at the mirror and doesn’t look away fast enough to miss his reflection’s pointed grin, even though Stiles isn’t smiling. The reflection face stays in place, unmoving, as he walks past the mirror and out the door.

Fifteen minutes later, he picks up Scott from the front of his house where he’s waiting with Allison, Lydia, and Isaac. As Scott takes the front seat and the other three pile in the back, he wonders what it would be like to go more than a day without having to see Isaac shoot a supercilious smirk in his direction.

“Ooh, someone’s been studying their SAT words,” Isaac says. “Color me intimidated.” When Stiles glances at him in the rearview mirror, Isaac’s eyebrow is arched. Fuck. Has he been voicing his thoughts out loud all day?

“Probably,” Scott says. “You do that when you’re tired." Lydia says, “Stiles, who cares, eyes on the road, please.”

He scowls in a way that’s meant to encompass all of them, then does what Lydia says and shifts the car down a gear. 

It’s windy and hot outside the clinic. Dust gusts up in erratic patterns and coats their slick foreheads with grit as they get out of the Jeep. 

Everything is normal outside the building except for the noticeable lack of cars, which is odd—though not unheard of—for a Monday afternoon. When they reach the door, it’s warded like it would be at the end of the workday. But it’s only 2:30, and the clinic should have opened at 7 a.m. 

Lydia and Stiles exchange a glance, and Lydia motions with her hands to vanish the ward with a sifting noise and whiff of sage. They step through the door.

The lights are off. “Hello?” Scott calls. “Alan? Are you there?”

No one answers. A switchblade appears in Allison’s hand, and Lydia raises her right hand in a defensive posture. Stiles feels power building around her, crackling like static. Scott and Isaac flank them with Stiles taking up the rearguard. He nudges the door closed behind them and flips on the lights. 

“Alan?” Scott calls, a little louder.

“I’ll check out the back,” Isaac says. Scott nods, and Allison follows Isaac out of the office and into the clinic. Lydia and Scott start to fan out. Stiles steps to follow them.

His world explodes in a flash of light that sends a burst of pain rocketing through his head. He hears something like a whisper in a strange voice or a howl without words or maybe the searing sound of a live wire snapping through all of his nerves at once. 

The next thing he knows he’s on his hands and knees, gasping for breath, and all he can hear is Scott repeating his name, his nails biting into Stiles’ shoulder. 

There’s a bright afterimage seared onto the backs of his eyelids like he’s stared straight at the sun. Slowly, it fades, and he registers the details around him—Scott’s plaid shirt hovers in front of him; he reaches for it, blinks, and Scott’s concerned face resolves into focus. Behind him, Lydia looks livid. 

Allison and Isaac come running back into the room, Allison having traded her switchblade for a handgun and Isaac snarling with his eyes flaring blue.

“Shit,” Stiles whispers as Scott says, “Shit, you’re freezing, Stiles,” and he realizes he is, that he can barely feel Scott’s steadying hand on his shoulder through the tremors wracking his body. 

“What the hell happened?” Isaac asks. 

“I have no fucking idea,” snarls Lydia. “That was some sort of malevolent spell, but I didn’t feel anything, which is impossible. Someone set a trap—someone exceptionally skilled, because there’s no _fucking_ way for me to not feel something that powerful."

Stiles wants to tell Lydia to stop swearing; she never swears and she's making it worse. He can't make his lips move, though, and besides, “C’mon, we’re going,” Scott says, heaving Stiles to his feet. Stiles staggers against him, the shaking in his legs making it almost impossible to stand. Scott wraps his arm around Stiles’ waist to hold him up better. Allison flips the light off with her free hand as they head towards the door.

The sunlight hits Stiles like a physical force, and he would sink to his knees without Scott. He presses the heels of his hands to his eyes, trying to block out the light, and Allison grabs him from the other side so he doesn’t collapse. He hears the sifting noise through the high-pitched whine in his head as Lydia reseals the ward, then she says, “Keys?”

“Back pocket,” Stiles grits out, and she grabs them. They all cram into the car, and Stiles bends down to bury his face in his knees and block out the light as soon as he’s settled in the front seat.

Lydia peals out of the parking lot. She doesn’t slow down when they hit the main highway through the forest.

“Stiles, do you have a blanket in here or something?” Allison asks from the back seat. He shakes his head.

“He says no,” Lydia repeats back to her, but each word stabs him through the ears and his covers them with his hands, tunes out, feels the rhythmic thrum of the tires over the seams in the road as he shivers and shakes.

He doesn’t know how much time passes until the pain in his head recedes enough that he can sit up and take his cupped hands off his ears. His eyes still closed, his teeth chattering, he reaches out a hand in Lydia’s direction. She makes an annoyed “tsk” noise, but puts her designer sunglasses in his hand. Stiles puts them on and sinks against the seat. 

The sunlight is so bright that he hears it as a ringing in his head, but with the sunglasses on and his eyes closed it’s bearable enough that Lydia doesn't have to pull over so he can throw up. Someone’s draped Allison’s leather jacket around his shoulders and he grips the sleeves, trying to will himself to warm up. Isaac’s stupid scarf is curled around his neck.

“—can’t feel anything,” Lydia is saying, her voice low and furious. “Honestly, it’s not possible, it’s not.”

“Did they leave it for Deaton, then?” Scott says. “Is he hurt somewhere, do you think? Like did someone freaking kidnap him? Why?”

Isaac mutters, "Great summer so far. First druid sacrifices, now this?” 

Allison says, “Everything in the back office was fine. It was like he went home for the day.”

“I’m not taking any chances,” Scott says. “We’re not going anywhere else, including Deaton’s house, until we figure out what the hell that was and why it hit Stiles.”

“I’m fine,” Stiles says, or tries to say, but he thinks it comes out more like a whimper. Someone puts a warm hand on his forehead and swears. 

“You’re getting colder,” says Lydia. She turns up the heat, which is already blaring through the vents, but it doesn’t do more than ghost across his icy skin. “We have to get you warm. You’re hypothermic.”

“S-s-spell?” he shivers. 

“It has to be, but I can’t feel it to pull it off you,” Lydia says, frustration raising her voice enough that Stiles winces. “Sorry,” she says. “Scott, your mom?”

“At home,” Scott says. “She says to get him there as quickly as possible and she can help.”

“I’m f-fine,” Stiles tries to say again, but Isaac says, “Stiles, shut up,” so he does. 

The next time he opens his eyes they’ve pulled up in front of Scott’s house and someone’s yanking open his side door. 

“Alright, kiddo,” he hears, and someone—Melissa?—tugs him out of the car. He tries to help, but his feet don’t work, and he ends up with Melissa under one arm and Scott under the next. He assumes they’re helping him walk into Scott’s house; his eyes are closed and he still has Lydia’s sunglasses on, which helps with the light, but now his brain is all fuzzy and his heart is starting to stutter in his chest. 

They put him on the couch, buried under heaps and heaps of blankets, all scratchy wool except the bottom one, closest to his skin, which is a cotton so soft and worn that he feels like it had to have been Scott’s baby blanket.

And then his world goes black. 

He thinks he hears people calling his name in the distance, but he can’t see anything, can’t feel anything except a strange lightness in his chest where something should be weighting him down—a heartbeat or a soul. Before he can piece it together, the empty blackness is replaced with a howl like a wolf’s. Something sinks back into him. He takes a breath. 

When he opens his eyes again, he has the sense that hours have passed. He can’t get his bearings. The lights are off and the curtains are shut and the glasses are off his face. 

Scott sits with his back against the couch near Stiles’ head, radiating heat in the way werewolves do that makes them delightful in the winter and absolutely unbearable in the summer. He feels another source of heat somewhere near his toes and figures Isaac’s perched on the other end of the couch. He tries to feel annoyed about it but finds he doesn’t have the energy.

Lydia murmurs in the background. At first he thinks she’s talking to Melissa, but then Melissa’s standing in front of him with a steaming mug of something hot. “Okay, kid,” she says. “Sit up and drink this.”

He does, teeth still chattering, and pulls the blankets up with him. Scott moves from the floor to sit next to him in the space left behind, and Stiles tilts until his head is on Scott’s warm shoulder. There’s something comforting about Scott being there that goes beyond the heat, like his presence is nearly enough to settle the anxious whine spreading through his body. 

He wonders blearily if it’s an alpha thing, another question to add to the list of werewolf trivia to ask Derek, after he asks Derek all the other things he’s been meaning to ask and apologize and explain and confess to Derek for so many hours now. 

“Stiles.” Melissa snaps her fingers a few inches away from his face. “Take this.” He obediently reaches out and, although his hands are still trembling, wraps his fingers around the steaming mug. He’s aware enough to be disappointed that it isn’t coffee, but he drinks the peppermint tea because Melissa, the most wonderful nurse in the world, told him to, and because it’s blissfully hot. He doesn’t mind that it scalds his throat. 

He catches snippets of Lydia’s conversation: “but what if…” “why can’t I…” He wants to ask who she’s talking to and if someone called his dad, but his tongue is heavy and words slip in and out of his brain without time to grasp and arrange them. Plus, Melissa is pulling the drink back out of his hands and clasping one warm hand around his wrist. “Pulse is stronger,” she says, smiling. "Here, finish it,” and he closes his hands around the warm mug again.

By the time he's through, he’s so tired that he wants to do nothing more than bury his head under the blankets and sleep for the next thousand hours. He wants to focus on the things happening around him, but all he can feel through his cotton ball–stuffed brain is a pang of panic about how he was supposed to have called Derek back by now, and Derek might be worried, or concerned, or annoyed, or, worst of all, might not have noticed at all.

“Hey,” Scott says, maybe feeling Stiles’ surge of anxiety as an accelerated heart beat or change in breathing pattern. “Everything’s going to be okay. Mom says your symptoms are getting better and you’re getting warmer, so you’re okay to fall asleep. Sound good?”

Stiles nods drowsily against Scott’s shoulder. “Sorry,” he tries to say, though he’s still not sure how well he’s forming words. 

“Don’t be,” Scott says. He pulls the empty mug from Stiles’ hands and sets it on the floor. “Not your fault. We’ll figure this out. But you can sleep first.” 

Scott starts to run his fingers through Stiles’ hair, kind of the way his dad did earlier that morning. He starts to fall asleep that way—shivering in spasms but not frequently, cozy on the McCalls’ couch and buried beneath blankets, Scott running his fingers in a quiet rhythm through Stiles’ hair. He thinks Scott is growling, but softly, not threateningly, just in a way that lets Stiles know he’s there. It’s the last sound he hears before he finally tips over the edge into sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I guess in this verse a necromancer is a powerful witch with an affinity for the dead. Basically, Lydia's a badass with skills. Also, I invented backstories and family members for all the side characters in Teen Wolf, because I love them. Also, Stiles works in a coffee shop, because I said so, and because these teens need jobs. Make some of that sweet sweet cash, teens. And finally, Scott is such a cute and perfect alpha, love u Scott.


	4. Chapter 4

Derek runs. Runs like he hasn’t run in days, not since the night before they left, when uncertainty and anxiety drove him to leave Cora sleeping in the loft while he drove to the preserve and sprinted through it on four legs like his life depended on it.

He never realizes how much energy and effort his human self puts into suppressing his wolf until he lets it in and feels whole again; shifting is always a full-body sigh of relief. The wolf sees the waves clearly at night the way his human eyes can’t, notes how starlight laces each crest. His paws dig into the cool sand and break the thin crust left by the tide. He knows he’s running too hard, that he’ll probably limp his way home—he’s run along the darkened beach for miles, but he’s not tired yet, hasn’t yet outrun the thoughts he left on the shore beside the house. 

When it runs, the wolf thinks in sensations, colors, scents. His conversation with Lydia can flow easily in and out of his brain, look like a river and smell pungently of fear and taste a thick, bloody red, but the wolf weaves it into the rest of its impressions as it absorbs the tang of dried kelp and, through a curtain of water, the scent of fish, their heartbeats quick against the sea floor. 

He stops when he’s panting so hard he can’t breathe and his heart is racing a million miles a second. He stretches out his front legs, then his back, and all but keels over. His tongue lolls into the sand. 

An seabird cries high in the night sky. Derek tries to close his eyes against the wolf prodding at him, _willful pup, stop ignoring me. It’s time to think about your pack. Think about how you can help them. This selfish avoidance of suffering—such a human emotion._

He doesn’t want to think. The last few hours are panic and fear and an urge need to run all the way home, now, as fast as possible, to find whatever’s targeting his pack—his more than pack; his family— and rip it to shreds with his bare teeth. 

But he sighs. Gives in. Amid the soughing of the sea he closes his eyes and sinks his nose into the sand to and lets the conversation from earlier in the evening catch up with him.

 

“I didn’t know who else to call,” she’d said, uncharacteristically frantic. “Deaton’s missing and Stiles is—he died, he died for a second and Scott brought him back and I didn’t know who to call—“

He’d been out on the beach, pacing, waiting for Stiles to call him. The house had been too much tonight; too many words, too much glare from the lights, too many people, too many unfamiliar scents overwhelming him. Cora had followed him with her gaze but let him go when he slipped out.

Instead of Stiles’ name on the caller ID, though, it had been Lydia’s, her voice shot through with panic. “Stop,” he’d said, reverting to the voice he’d used most often as an alpha on wolves coming up on the change and lashing out in fear at anyone around them. “Lydia, back up. Tell me what happened.” 

His voice carried enough calming authority that she took a breath and started talking. They’d gone over to Deaton’s, she said—he didn’t fully understand why, something to do with Stiles wanting to ask him a question—and Stiles had collapsed with no warning. 

“I thought maybe he was having a grand mal seizure—no, that’s not right, they call them tonic-clonic now—whatever, it doesn’t matter, he was making this noise that people do when they seize, and he was spasming all over the place.”

 _Three goddamn days,_ he remembers thinking. _Three goddamn days and this is all it takes for you to get yourself into some kind of disaster, you goddamn idiot._ Then, _He almost died. He almost died and I wasn’t there._

“Okay, then what happened?”

“Scott grabbed him and he kind of snapped out of it, but he was ice cold, so we all knew it had to be something supernatural, but I couldn’t sense it, which got weirder and weirder when I realized it was supposed to kill him.”

Kill him. Jesus Christ, Stiles. “Because you should have felt something.”

“Yes, I should have felt something, stop repeating what I’m saying and actually help me work through this.”

The more biting Lydia is, the more she cares about something. “Okay, so when did you realize it—the spell—whatever it was—was meant to kill him?”

“When we got outside it seemed like he had a migraine, and then he was cold to the touch and we couldn’t warm him up, and obviously the hyperthermia was magically induced and headaches aren’t a typical sign of seizures. But it wasn’t until Scott’s house that he went completely incoherent. He was mumbling something and no one could tell what he was saying. And then we got him on the couch, and then he was just…gone.”

“Meaning?” Derek asks, throat dry.

“Meaning one second I could sense he was alive, the next second, I knew he wasn’t. But there wasn’t any warning—I didn’t scream. I couldn’t even see his soul to pull it back. He was…gone.”

At some point in the last few minutes he’s sunk down to the sand. Somewhere at the back of his mind he can feel his wolf telling him to stay calm. Stay human. 

“But you brought him back.”

“Obviously,” she says, and her voice only wavers slightly. “It wasn’t me, though. It was Scott.”

“What did he do?”

“He howled. Like, really howled. I could feel the noise in my bones. We all could. And then Stiles was back.”

“And now? How is he now?”

"Melissa says his heartbeat’s regular, which it wasn’t before, and that he’s not as cold as he was. Medically speaking, he should be fine in a few hours.”

Derek hesitates to ask his next question. “Is he…awake?”

“Yes, but Melissa wants him to sleep,” Lydia says in her more normal, quelling tone. Derek knows—they both know—that once Stiles gets Derek on the phone, it’ll be a struggle to get him to shut up, recently dead (twice dead, he thinks, twice in a week, that’s got to be some kind of fucking record) though he may be. 

“Alright. So he’s fine, for now.” A wolf would have picked up on the lie in his voice immediately. Maybe he can sound confident enough that he can convince Lydia, even if he can’t convince himself.

“Sure,” Lydia says, only a little skeptically. “He’s fine.” Derek hears her pull out a chair and sink into it; she must be sitting at the McCalls’ kitchen table. “I’ve probably only said this five times in my life, and I hate that I’m saying it now, but I’ve never heard of anything like this happening before. Have you?”

He’s silent. He listens to her breathe over the phone and considers the waves while he presses his toes into the sand. A long-ago memory prods at him—it hovers on the tip of his tongue and tastes like ice and cinnamon, but he bites it back. “I might have,” he says, finally. “I might have heard of something like this. But I want to be sure. I’ll have to talk to Scott.”

“I’ll get him.”

“No, don’t,” he says quickly. “The alpha’s presence can accelerate a pack member’s healing process.” He wants Stiles to have all the help he can get. 

“Really?” she says, interested. “How?”

“An alpha’s job is to protect the pack. Just being near the alpha is enough to help the betas feel calmer, more secure, which helps them heal faster. You’ve probably noticed it before even if you didn’t know why. He just makes you—all of us—feel subconsciously safer. More protected.”

“Fascinating,” she says in her academic voice, which Derek finds he much prefers to her panicked-about-Stiles-and-death voice. “Does Scott know?”

It’s Derek’s turn to sigh. “Probably not.” He doesn’t remember telling Scott about it, and the kid, bless his heart, probably hadn’t picked up on it himself. 

“Fine, I won’t pull him away. But you really won’t tell me what it is? Really, Derek? Is it that bad? I mean, obviously it’s bad,” she corrects herself. “How bad is it?”

“I think,” he says, “you should stay inside for the rest of the night. And stay together. Once Boyd and Erica get there, have Melissa seal the house’s wards.” 

“So you're saying you think whoever set the trap could come back for us.”

The sound of his own heartbeat rises in his ears. He's shaking with the effort of holding back his shift. “I’m not sure. If Deaton’s gone, maybe they already got him, or maybe he’s running and they’re chasing him. Either way, they could be going after Deaton instead of focusing on you. They probably thought their spell worked and that...” He pauses and rolls the words in his mouth. “They probably think Stiles is dead. But better safe than sorry.”

“Usually I disagree with the sweeping generalization of that ridiculous adage. But in this instance, yes. I agree with you.”

“Great,” he says. “If this is what I think it is, you’ll be safe for the time being. Just—sit tight until I call you back.” An 18-hour flight separates him from the others; there’s nothing he can do to help, and it's going to drive him wild. He suddenly understands what Stiles means when he says there’s so much anxiety running through him he might explode, trapped in his too-small skin. 

She promises to text him with any updates. He hangs up, steps out of his tennis shoes, shucks of his clothes. Closes his eyes and lets the shift take him. And then he’s gone, down the beach, as far as it takes for him to run away from the knowledge that Stiles nearly died and that he hadn’t been there to save him.

 

 

When he gets back, Cora’s sitting on the beach directly beyond the house, wrapped in a blanket. He’d been right—he’d worn himself out on his initial run, and now he limps every few steps. He flops next to her and rests his head on her knee. She’s shivering. He nips her lightly to show his displeasure.

“Yeah, yeah, I know, you big bully,” she says. “I know werewolves aren’t supposed to be cold and I know it’s weird that I am and I know that recently poisoned werewolves shouldn’t sit outside in the cold. But who else was gonna carry your clothes back inside?”

He huffs at her, then nudges her knee with his nose, trying to prod her to her feet. She pushes him away and stands up.

“Something happened.” He doesn’t move, and she says, “Whatever it was, you wanna tell me about it?” 

He narrows his eyes, annoyed by the question. She doesn’t need the extra burden, and, as experience has taught Derek too well, good rarely comes of conversation. 

Cora notices the change in his posture and puts her hands on her hips.

“Look. I know you don’t want to hear this. But you’re not alone anymore, Der. Or you don’t have to be. Other people can help you. Like, I can help you. I’m here, and I’m your family. You can talk to me, you stubborn ass."

He considers her and tries not to reveal the warmth that ran through him when she called him “Der,” the nickname his father always called him by, and Laura, and his mom when he was little and she was tickling him to make him laugh or tucking him into bed or planting a kiss on his head for no reason or whispering that she loved him. Der. 

Then Cora quirks an eyebrow and gives him the most scathing look he’s ever seen on another person. It’s a one-hundred-percent trademarked Hale look. Damn, he thinks. Even Laura couldn’t rival that, and Laura had out-eyebrowed everyone else in the family.

Eyebrow raised, she says, “I mean, obviously, if you don’t say anything, I’m going to take that as a yes. So I’ll let you in your room and tickle-torture you until you’re forced to tell me about it. And—“ when he huffs again—“you’re annoyed at me for getting cold, which is totally victim-blamey, but I’ll make myself some hot chocolate anyway. How’s that?”

When he doesn’t answer, she sighs. “And I’ll put on some sweats and grab a blanket and bring the space heater. I’ll be warm in no time. Happy now?”

Derek knocks his head against her knees, and she puts a hand between his ears. “Come on,” she says. “Let’s go inside.” 

 

 

They both sit on his bed. Cora brings a mug of hot chocolate spiked with cayenne for Derek, too, and they both sip at their drinks while he fills her in on his conversation with Lydia.

“I might know something about what’s happening, but I want to talk to Scott first and see if he noticed anything more than Lydia did,” he finishes.

Even though she’s wearing her sweats and sitting right in the heater’s path, Cora still looks paler than she did this afternoon. She yawns and says, “How long have we even been gone? Three days? That’s seriously how long it took Stiles to get himself in a lethal mess?”

“That’s exactly what I said,” Derek mutters. 

“Without you that kid is a walking disaster,” she says, but looks away when Derek glances at her.

As he picks up his phone, Cora asks, “What time is it?” and yawns again.

“Two thirty,” he says with some surprise, glancing at his phone. Lydia called him around eight Argentina time; he ran for much longer than he thought. No wonder Cora had been so cold. She’d been waiting for ages.

The phone rings three times before Scott picks up. “Hey, Derek,” he whispers. He sounds absolutely exhausted.

“How's Stiles?”

“Still asleep. Mom says he’s holding steady or whatever—his temperature’s going up to something more normal and his pulse is the same.”

“Can you talk for a second? And then I want you to get right back to Stiles after. Get everyone else too—I want to ask all of you about this.”

“Sure, man,” Scott says, taking Derek’s orders in stride, and Derek hears him ease of the couch. He also hears someone’s deep, slow breaths in the background—Stiles’. 

“Wait," Derek says. "Leave someone with him." 

“Okay, Boyd's on it,” Scott says. “Isaac, come on man.” 

Scott assembles them all in the kitchen, and he puts his own phone on speaker so Cora can hear. She says hi, Lydia and Erica say hi back before Derek cuts them off.

“First question. I want everyone to tell me what their impression of Stiles was when he…when you got him to Scott’s house.”

“Hypothermic,” Lydia says. Scott says, “Dude, colder than anything. It was like—like a physical shock, when I grabbed him, he was so cold.”

“Okay. And when you were at the office, the clinic itself was at a normal temperature, right?”

“Right,” Scott says. ”Everything was fine.”

“Like he’d just locked up for the day,” Allison agrees. “Same as always.” 

"Me and Boyd didn’t get here until two hours after it happened,” Erica says, “and as soon as we walked in the door, we both felt the cold. It was definitely coming from Stiles.” 

“Okay,” Derek says, glancing at Cora. She’s watching him with her head tilted, wondering what he’s about to say. “This is a shitty lead, but it’s the only one I have.” And he starts to tell them.

 

It started in the winter of the year he turned ten. He remembers waking up to the sound of his mom’s voice in the kitchen. She’d been gone for the last two days, and no one would tell Derek where she was, only that she was dealing with pack business. The adults had been calm about it, but Derek had been on edge the entire time. She was rarely gone for that long. 

When he snuck down the stairs that night to see her, though, she wasn’t alone. Peter and Deaton and Derek’s favorite aunt, Carissa, were all standing in the kitchen, along with a woman whose scent was unfamiliar to him, one who was definitely human. More precisely, they were standing around the kitchen table. Derek took one look at it—at the small body on top of it—and fled back upstairs before the adults could notice him.

He’d seen the grim expressions on their faces, noted the stiff, shell-shocked movements of the human he didn’t recognize, and gotten a glimpse of the boy’s face. It was someone he recognized from school—Christopher, Derek thought his name was. He’d had floppy strawberry-blonde hair and a gap-toothed smile and gave off the faint scent of something like cinnamon that Derek always picked up around sparks. And he was dead. 

Derek didn’t stay downstairs long enough to figure out what killed him, beyond noting that he didn’t smell any blood or see so much as a scratch on the body. What he did feel, though, was a cold radiating from the body so profound that when he got back to bed, he had to breathe on the tips of his fingers to warm them up. His nose was still cold when he woke up the next day.

In the morning, the boy’s body and the woman were gone. His dad was uncharacteristically silent while he fixed the hearty, homemade oatmeal he made for them on winter mornings with coconut and almond slivers and a pinch of chocolate. Derek kept waiting for his dad to mention what had happened last night, clarify it. He never did. Just hugged them tight before sending them off to school. 

At school, his teacher told them that a boy in their grade had "passed away" last night. She didn’t say “murdered,” but she also didn’t say how he died, and Derek was the only one who knew she hedged the truth. 

The rest of the school day was subdued but full of grade-school whispers between students conjecturing about how the boy died. Derek didn’t volunteer his information. He was a quiet boy anyway, and at ten, he already knew the most important rules: stay away from hunters, keep pack business secret, and never, ever mention werewolves.

A few months passed, and eventually, he managed to put it out of his mind. When something serious happened, the adults almost always let the rest of the kids in on it, if only to warn them to be careful. The fact that they didn’t mention anything made Derek think it was a one-time thing, something the pack had already solved. Disturbing, distressing, but over with. Other pack matters took precedence in his head, things the kids his age and older were allowed to help out with—a group of vampires settling in a nearby town, a kelpie infestation in the lake at the wood’s center. 

But in the spring, Derek had again woken up to the sound of adults whispering in the kitchen at two in the morning. When he snuck out of his room, he saw a man spread-eagled on the table. 

From his perch on the stairs, Derek could see there weren’t any cuts on the body, no gunshot wounds, no apparent cause of death. He caught the faintest whiff of cinnamon and started to feel the encroaching cold from the body before Peter noticed him on the stairs and sent him running back up with a snarl.

The pattern repeated itself over and over that summer. A teenage girl, an old woman, a toddler. The adult pack members finally gathered the kids together and told them something was going on, but they wouldn’t get into any specifics, no matter how much they wheedled. As far as he knew, Derek was the only one who knew anything about the bodies they kept finding, that they were shrouded in cold so thick it was like a physical blow.

As the killings continued, his mom kept William, Derek’s next-oldest brother, as close to her as possible. He was the only born witch, not a born werewolf. But he wasn’t a spark, not as far as Derek knew—he was a green witch whose power lay deep in the earth, among growing, creeping things. 

It ended six months after it had started, on a night when he peered down the stairs to see the adults gathered in the kitchen. There was no body on the kitchen table—just the strong smell of death, of blood crusting under fingernails and adrenaline from the hunt and the kill. The sweet-bitter scent of a spark lingered on their clothes.

 

“And that’s it,” he finishes lamely. Now that he’s said it out loud, it sounds even more like a stretch than it already did. If his meager memory is all they have to go on, they’re fucked. 

“Okay," Allison says when no one else speaks. "so basically, you’re saying that years ago, there was someone in Beacon Hills killing sparks."

“Right,” Derek says. “All the dead were sparks, and it didn't stop until my pack killed.....whoever they killed.” 

“Deaton was there,” Cora says. “Maybe he can fill in the blanks.”

“Actually, that might be why he’s gone,” says Lydia. 

“You think they—“ Allison starts. 

“No, I don’t think they killed him,” Lydia says. “But I think he could be running. Which is incredibly unfair to us, I might add. Since we have nothing to go on.”

“Mostly it’s unfair to Stiles,” Cora points out, and they’re all quiet a second. 

“Speaking of Stiles,” Lydia says. “I don’t suppose he told you what happened to him the other night, or, I don’t know, the entire reason we were at Deaton’s in the first place.”

Cora shoots a glance at Derek; he refuses to meet it. “No,” he says, finally. “He didn’t.”

“Isn’t it his issue to tell?” Scott murmurs.

“Not anymore,” Lydia says. “Not after this. It’s pack business now. And everyone here knows as well as I do that he only didn’t tell Derek because he was worried he’d come tearing back into town or something if he knew something was wrong.”

“If I knew what was wrong?” Derek says. 

The line is silent. Derek pictures Lydia and Scott glaring at each other, having a silent war of wills. Allison speaks before either of them can talk.

“Executive decision,” she says. “I’ll tell Derek. The rest of you can have plausible deniability if Stiles is mad.”

Erica snaps her gum and says, “Fair enough. You're the only one who's not bitchy enough for him to stay mad at forever."

Scott says, “Alright, if that’s all for tonight, I’ll get back to Stiles, see if he’s still sleeping or whatever. Derek, hey, thanks for calling. I’ll talk to you later, okay?” 

“Sure, Scott,” Derek says. Before he can stop himself, he adds, “Tell Stiles—“

Lydia cuts him off. “Yes, Derek, I already told you I’ll tell him to call you once he wakes up, but it obviously won’t be for a while.” 

It isn't what Derek was going to say, actually, but he bites his tongue. The others head out of the kitchen and Allison picks up the phone. 

Cora looks at him and he jerks his head at the door. She sighs, but gathers up her blanket and their empty mugs. She kisses the top of his head before she leaves, shutting the door behind her.

“Alright,” Derek sighs. “Tell me whatever it is that Stiles didn’t want me to know.”

“First, are you okay?” Allison says quietly. If she's trying to keep the wolves in the other room from overhearing her, it’s a lost cause, but he appreciates the effort. 

“I’m…” He swallows. “I’m fine.”

He can tell she doesn't like it, but she lets it slide. “Okay, the other day, Stiles called us over to talk to us about a weird dream he had…”

While she talks, Derek goes to the window and opens it. Instead of looking at his wrist when she tells him Stiles thought he’d hurt someone in a dream but hadn’t said who it was, he looks up at the stars. The only constellation he recognizes is the Southern Cross. He studies it as she describes Stiles’ unease, how he’d woken up with fire in his hands and veins. 

In the distance, the waves lap and recede with a sound like applause. It mingles in his head with Allison’s soft voice. Her words skim the surface of his tired brain. 

Thanks to the new moon, he has a panoramic view of the stars overhead—thousands more than he could see in the relative darkness of the preserve. It’s night in Beacon Hills by now. He pictures the McCalls’ kitchen window, the meager light from the stars spiderwebbing the tree in the backyard, just bright enough to edge Allison’s dark hair with silver. 

As she talks and he listens, he realizes: neither of them are looking at the same stars. Only at the same void left behind by the moon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ugh, so expositiony. Hopefully the next chapter will be more interesting.
> 
> songs for this chapter: Run Boy Run and Conquest of Spaces, both by woodkid


	5. Chapter 5

He tries to text Derek the truth. Or most of it, anyway.

_hi. im alive. allison said she told you what happened w/ me the other night. didnt tell you myself bc lost track of time + im a coward ___

He waits for a second after sending it, then types,

_also didnt want to tell you ive been having weird dreams feat you. got scared i was hurting you. ___

He sends it, then jumps when the phone almost immediately starts ringing. The noise startles the phone out of his hands; he stares at it until it stops ringing.

He leans back into the couch, but the phone vibrates with a text. He grabs it.

_pick up the phone, stiles. ___

The phone rings again. Stiles doesn’t answer.

_if you're not answering because you're afraid to talk to me, you’re being selfish. answer the goddamn phone._

He should have called Derek right when he woke up instead of flipping through TV channels from Scott’s couch for an hour, a pit of anxiety in his stomach and a chill in the center of his chest. When the phone rings again, he answers.

“I’m sorry,” he says, as Derek says, “Dammit, how are you?”

“Oh,” Stiles says. “Um—“

“Don’t say fine. You're not.”

Something about the emotion in his voice reminds him of the hospital elevator when he stared at Derek with panic and desperation in his eyes and Derek stared back, mirroring the look. 

“Uh, okay. Well, I’m not fine, but I’m, like, fine-ish for someone who was frozen half to death yesterday.” _All the way to death_ hangs on the tip of his tongue, but he doesn’t say it, and neither does Derek.

“You should have called.”

“I know,” Stiles says. 

They’re both silent.

“How’s your dad?” Derek finally asks.

“Oh man,” Stiles says, sinking back into the couch and running his spare hand through his hair. “Flipping out. I could tell he wanted to yell at me, but it turns out near-death experiences have a few perks, and one of them is that no one can yell at you for a good 24 hours.”

“Try me,” Derek says.

“Hey, nothing about this was my fault,” Stiles protests. 

“That would be a first.”

“Ha ha. No, seriously, I didn’t—”

“Stiles,” Derek interrupts. “Just tell me how you are.” 

Stiles sighs. “Alright. If you really want to know, I feel like I got hit by a truck. I mean I feel like I’m covered in bruises but there aren’t actually any bruises so it’s kind of like a bunch of ghosts used me as a punching bag or something.”

“And you’re cold."

He sighs again. “Yes. I’m cold.” He’s fucking freezing. He’s still piled under the same amount of blankets he was last night—so all of the blankets in Scott and Melissa’s house. He’s wearing a long-sleeved shirt and Scott’s long pajamas. He still feels like he’s been dunked in ice water and shoved in a freezer. “This is about what you told everyone last night, right? Look, Deaton explained this to me, it’s not like sparks have a literal, actual connection to fire, the name is just a metaphor for the way sparks jumpstart magic. It doesn’t make sense to try to kill me with a fucking cold front because I’m not, like, some magical fire being—“

“Except for when you are.”

“Says who?”

“Says Allison.”

“Jesus, Derek…“ He tries to swallow the words, but maybe he's too tired, or maybe he almost died and maybe he doesn't give a shit anymore, because he says, “Look, I wanted to tell you, but I’ve been having the weirdest fucking dreams and I didn’t know how to ask you about them because I hurt you in them, right? Like, I fucking burn you, Derek, and then I wake up on fucking fire, but it’s fine, it doesn’t hurt me, but I think _you’re_ hurt somehow because I saw your wrist that morning before you guys left and I didn’t know what to do about it so I didn’t say anything.”

“Stiles—“

“But if someone’s trying to kill me like they killed all those other sparks, it would just be because of general sparkiness, right? But what if it has to do with this weird fun new fire thing? That would mean it’s not at all like what happened when you were little and we have nothing to go off of, and it’s only been a few days but I’m already terrified of what I could do to you when—“ 

“Stiles,” Derek says. “I’m not scared of you.”

“Yeah, well, you should be. I mean, I’m scared of me, and apparently someone else is too, or else why would that whole shitstorm have gone down like it did yesterday, and why would Deaton say what he did and then disappear, and--”

“I’m not scared of you,” Derek repeats. “I’m scared _for _you.”__

“Don’t be, I can totally take care of myself, I’m fine, I’m—“

“Obviously,” says Derek dryly. “You’re doing fine. I should come back and…”

“No!” Stiles says. “No, no, nope, please don’t come back, Derek, please.”

Derek’s stunned silence makes Stiles realize how he sounded.

“Oh geez, not like that, you idiot, of course I want you around, I just…”

“Stiles, it’s fine.”

“No, it’s not fine, and you’re not listening!” He makes an exasperated noise. “Listen, what if I thought everyone in my family was dead, right, and then my dad magically showed up out of nowhere, like, surprise, I thought I was all alone in the world but it turns out I’m not! Awesome! But then right after that, say there was a big epic battle between some badass heroes and some serious assholes, and then say my dad asked if I wanted to go hang with him after that, just me and him, so we could get to know each other again.”

“Stiles--”

“So say I left with him, and then say like two days later, your dumb ass lands itself in trouble. Would you want me to come running back, even though by the time I got back you’d be, like, recovering, and the actual threat might not even exist anymore?”

There's a brief pause. Derek says, “I would want…”

“No, don’t lie to me, you know for a fact that you wouldn’t want me to come back, because you’d be worried you were fucking up the only chance I had to feel like a part of a family. You’d feel stupid if I came back, especially since the same type of supernatural drama happens in Beacon Hills whether or not I’m there.”

“Supernatural drama tends to happen more often when you’re around than not.”

“Damn straight,” Stiles says, trying not to let his relief that Derek's voice sounds a little more normal show. “So you get it. So don’t come back. Not yet. Okay?”

Derek’s silent for a second. “Okay,” he says. “Where’s everyone else?”

“Work,” Stiles says. “Except Dad, he went home to sleep.” Stiles didn’t feel like moving from the couch—wasn’t sure how well he could move, actually, and didn’t want to find out quite yet. 

“Scott’s at the clinic?”

“Yeah, Isaac and Scott are checking on the animals, taking animals on walks and stuff. Calling some of the owners to pick them up if they’re not boarding. Scott called me to tell me they’re fine,” he adds, interpreting Derek’s stony silence as a mask for worry. “There wasn’t anything weird when they got there.” He yawns.

“You should go back to sleep,” Derek says. When Stiles opens his mouth to interject, Derek cuts him off. “We can talk about the dream thing later.”

“But you know what I’m talking about, right?” Stiles asks. “I know something’s happening to me, Derek, and I know I’m doing something to you too.”

“Nothing that can’t be fixed,” Derek says. “Stop worrying about it. I’m fine. You’re not fine. Take care of yourself instead of stressing about everyone else.”

“But—“

“Stiles. Go to sleep.”

And so he does.


	6. Chapter 6

Stiles misses the first day of school, so he meets Kira Yukimura a day after everyone else. He’s shoving his books into his locker when one further down the hallway slams and he looks over and sees her, wearing comic-book-patterned leggings and a sleeveless black tunic that emphasizes her frankly amazing arms. 

She’s talking to Scott with a nervous but wide smile on her face. Scott is leaning against the locker next to her, grinning as she talks and tilting towards her, like he’s a sunflower and she’s the sun. 

“She’s a kitsune,” someone says behind him. He jumps and whirls around to see Lydia staring at Kira with her eyes narrowed.

“Stop _doing _that,” Stiles says. “Freaks me out every goddamn time.”__

“You startle too easily. It’s funny,” Lydia says, without taking her eyes off Scott and Kira.

“And you can’t startle any of the others, supernatural or otherwise perceptively gifted, so I’m the only easy target,” Stiles says. When she doesn’t respond, Stiles asks, “Okay, cool, she’s a kitsune, what’s a kitsune?”

“An immortal Japanese fox spirit,” Lydia says. 

“We asked Derek about it last night,” Allison says, coming up behind Lydia. She yawns. “Hey, Stiles. Feeling better?”

“Generally,” Stiles says, shifting his books from one arm to the other.

Allison puts her hand to his forehead anyway and frowns. Stiles shrugs her off, and she rolls her eyes. “ _I_ think she’s being overprotective of Scott.”

“You don’t find it weird?” Lydia snaps. “The month after we made the town a literal beacon for dark creatures, she enrolls?”

“I don’t think kitsune are usually dark,” Allison says. “That’s not what Derek made it sound like, anyway. Plus, she was really polite about introducing herself to the alpha, which is what Derek says you’re supposed to do when you enter someone else’s territory.”

Derek Hale: Werewolf Guru strikes again. Stiles sometimes wonders if there’s anything he doesn’t know.

Lydia says, “Stiles, obviously there is, but he _does _know more about werewolf lore and magical creatures than the rest of us combined, especially with Deaton gone. When we talked to him last night, he seemed adamant that kitsune are helpful guardian spirits, if spirits with a somewhat tangled morality.” She frowns. “But Derek’s not _here_ , so I don’t see how he can know definitively—“ __

“You realize they can both probably hear us, right?” says Stiles. “I mean, do kitsune have super-hearing like werewolves?”

“I don’t think so,” says Allison. “Plus, look at him, he could hear us if he wanted to, but he’s clearly distracted.”

“Say his name. That’ll get his attention,” says Lydia.

“Who, me?” says Stiles. “Why would Scott pay attention to me and not—“

But Scott’s already turned his head. When he sees Stiles, he lights up. “Hey man! What’s up?” he calls. He says something to Kira, and she looks hesitant but follows him towards the others anyway.

“Hey, I haven't seen you in forever! How’re you feeling, dude?” Scott asks. 

“Oh, well, I'm here, so. Can't complain” Stiles hasn’t seen Scott much over the last few days; Scott’s been busy trying to run the clinic with Isaac for backup and spending his spare time prowling around town with the pack. Stiles had wanted to help, but it was all he could do to drag his ass out of bed to work for the last five days. Mostly, he watched anime with Erica and played video games with Allison while Lydia sat on the couch and read all the books for the upcoming semester’s classes. Otherwise, he was lying on the couch or sleeping upstairs with the blinds open and the lights on. He felt too gross and cold and tired and sick to drag himself out of bed early on that first day of school. His dad didn’t hassle him about it, and he slept most of the day away.

Meanwhile, Scott and Isaac and Boyd and Erica, when she wasn’t forcing Stiles to watch Neon Genesis Evangelion, have been out each night looking for…something. Anything out the ordinary. So far, there’s nothing. Worse, there’s still no sign of Deaton, and Morrell’s gone too. Stiles’ dad filed a missing persons report. Apart from that, they don’t know what else to do.

“Scott, I think we should talk about—“ Lydia starts, but the first bell rings.

“Hey, Stiles, this is Kira,” Scott says. “She just moved here like, last week. Her dad’s the new principal.”

“Hi!” Kira says breathlessly. Along with her fantastic outfit, she’s wearing a slim black ribbon around her throat that supports a small, delicate pearl. The glare from the fluorescent lights doesn’t dim its rosy glow. 

“It’s nice to see you again,” Allison tells her with a smile. She nudges Lydia, who forces a fake smile on her face. Kira falters a bit.

Stiles knows from experience that the fake smile is even worse than the death glare. “So, Kira, what’s your first class?” he asks.

“Um, English, I think.” She shifts her books to her other arm.

“Hey, me too. With Whitaker, right? I’ll show you where it is, if you want.” 

“Totally! That would be nice! I mean, if you don’t mind,” she amends, looking insecure. 

“No problem.” He claps Scott on the shoulder. “See you next period, buddy.” He waves back at Lydia and Allison, who head in the opposite direction with Scott. Lydia only looks away at the last possible second; her murderous stare bores into his back all the way down the hallway.

Stiles chats with Kira on the way to class and learns that her favorite super-villain is Magneto, her favorite retro video game is a tie between Sonic the Hedgehog and Gauntlet, her family moved here from the Midwest a week and a half ago, her dad is South Korean and her mom is Japanese, and she’s fluent in four languages. She’s unwound slightly by the time they reach the classroom, but he pauses right outside the door and she stops with him, her nervousness immediately restored. 

“Hey, just real quick, I wanted to say, don’t take Lydia personally. I mean, I totally understand if you do. Scott just…” What’s the best way to phrase this? “He just trusts everyone. Like, everyone. Including people he shouldn’t. Including people very recently who he trusted over people he should have trusted more. So you can see why she’s kind of gone all overprotective-mom on him.” 

“Oh, yeah, I can definitely see why. I mean, she’s in his pack, right?”

“We’re all in his pack,” he says, “but yeah, we kinda don’t use the p-word on campus so much anymore. Turns out way more of your teachers and fellow classmates than you’d believe are villains in disguise.”

“Sorry,” she stammers, turning pink. Stiles brushes it off as Isaac walks past the two of them into the classroom. As per the norm, he raises an eyebrow at Stiles as he walks by. Stiles doesn’t miss the tension in his stance, though, and wonders if it’s because he heard Stiles talking about the pack to someone he still considers a stranger or if it's because he’s Isaac and he’s contrary for no reason. 

The second bell rings. Kira bites her lip, then says, “Um, can I sit by you? In class? Is that weird to ask?” 

He doesn’t know why—they don’t look the same, and they certainly don’t act anything like each other—but a picture of Derek on his first day back in Beacon Hills swims to the top of his head. He remembers Derek slouched in the backseat of a cop car, his surly glare trying to mask red-rimmed eyes, shoulders hunched like they could protect him from whatever barbed words he assumed Stiles would spit at him. The exact words Stiles did spit at him approximately two seconds later.

He’s not imagining the apprehension in Kira’s eyes. "Sure,” he says. “Yeah. Definitely.” 

 

At lunch, Kira holds up rather well under Lydia’s icy stare. Some of that might be Scott’s smile, which is continuously aimed in her direction. Scott either doesn’t care what Lydia thinks or, more likely, is oblivious to it. 

Stiles slips in and out of the conversation, but he tunes back in when Kira starts telling them about herself and about her mom, who’s also a kitsune. “My mom doesn’t think that wolves and foxes should mix, which is why she wouldn’t introduce herself to you. But to be fair, I guess, she’s old enough that being polite to whoever was in charge of a specific territory wasn’t even a thing. Centuries ago if you were on someone else’s territory, it was probably to kill them and steal their land.”

It takes Stiles’ brain a few seconds to catch up to her words. “Centuries? How old is she?”

“A little over 800."

He stares at her. “You probably don’t mean 800 months.”

“What exactly did you think ‘immortal’ meant, Stiles?” Lydia scoffs. 

He understands immortality as a concept, but staring it in the face is unsettling. “Wait, so how old are you?”

Allison looks like she’s about to tell him off for being rude, but Kira says. “215, in a few months,” and Allison switches to gaping along with Stiles. She recovers much faster than he does.

“I guess you’ve seen a lot of changes in the world, then,” she says, and Kira nods. 

“Welcome to Beacon Hills,” Isaac drawls. “Where the life expectancy is much shorter than 215 years.”

“Yes, why did you move to this beacon of supernatural happenings, Kira? If you don’t mind me asking?” Lydia says primly.

“I think my mom’s hunting something,” she says. “She won’t really talk to me about it, or to my dad. I just know that some sort of event happened about a month ago, and that event drew the thing she's hunting from wherever it had been hiding before to here.”

“Huh,” Stiles says. 

“Yeah, that would be our bad,” Erica says, leaning back against Boyd’s chest. He passes her a bag of cheddar and sour cream potato chips, and she somehow manages to fit an entire handful in her mouth without smudging her blood-red lipstick at all. She also manages to make it look ridiculously sexy. She winks at Kira. “Sorry about that.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean to make it sound like it was your fault!” Kira says, flustered. “I don’t see how you guys could have anything to do with drawing some ancient Japanese spirit all the way to the West Coast. I’m sure it wasn’t you.”

“Well…” Scott says, breaking his entranced silence. “About that…”

 

 

When Stiles finally gets home, he crashes. Crashes hard. He hadn’t felt truly warm even once at school, and during his classes, the words kept slipping off the pages of his textbooks and rearranging themselves into gibberish. All the details about Kira stand out in his mind. Everything else feels like it’s slipping away, water through cupped hands.

He pulls up the blinds and tumbles onto the patch of sunlight that shines across his bed. When he sleeps he doesn’t dream of fire. 

He dreams of trees—the trees up at the preserve, thick rows of pines dotted with oaks and elms shedding red, yellow, and orange leaves. He dreams he wanders through them as the sun sets and the light bleeds out. He thinks he hears whispers, but whenever he turns to look towards the sound, the voices fall silent.

When Stiles wakes up, it’s dark outside. The square of sunshine is gone, and it’s freezing—he’s freezing, not the room, he knows, but he shoves the knowledge to the back of his brain. In spite of his nap, he feels the opposite of well rested. His eyes are still scratchy with tiredness and the muscles in his legs feel jumpy. 

His textbooks are stacked haphazardly on the desk beneath the quilt-covered mirror, Lydia's post-it notes marking essential parts of the reading he missed. They're color-coded by subject, apparently—some are pink, some neon blue or green—but he wasn’t paying attention when Lydia explained her system. 

He already has a three-page paper due tomorrow for his history class, the one taught by Kira’s dad. He has four sheets of math problems to solve. There’s a 95% chance of a pop quiz on the reading for his biology class first thing in the morning, and he needs to get a head start on the first novel assignment for their English class or he’ll get behind.

If he's not going to study or read, he should at least go downstairs and throw something healthy together and leave it on the counter where his dad will see it and feel obligated to eat it after his shift. He should text Scott to see if he went to Kira’s after school and met her mom and learned anything about the ancient evil creature she’s hunting through their territory. He should read another Borges short story so he can talk to Derek about it. 

Instead, he wraps himself up in a blanket, shuffles across the room, and flips on the lights. He grabs the bestiary from its very secret, very safe hiding place under his bed and calls Derek, who answers on the second ring, as always.

“Hey,” Derek says. There’s a faint rushing noise in the background; something like the whispers he’d heard in his dream. After a moment, he realizes it’s the ocean. 

Stiles wants to ask about his day. He wants to know if he’s had any other weird fire dreams even though Stiles hasn’t had any, how Cora’s doing, how Derek feels and if he’s okay or if he’s worried or if he’s mad. Instead, he says, “Okay, so Kira, right? I get that she’s a kitsune, but what’s a kitsune?”

“They’re immortal,” Derek says. “They’re associated with Inari, who most westerners see as a god even though that’s not the most accurate description. Kitsune are Inari’s messengers, and people leave offerings at Inari shrines asking the kitsune to carry a message to Inari. They generally do good, but they’re a little subjective in their morality. Sometimes they lure travelers into the forest using these things called fox lights. They can shape-shift into nearly any form. And they can create strong illusions that most humans—and even most werewolves—can’t tell are fake.”

“Huh,” Stiles says. “So a lot, then. You know a lot.”

“I know a lot about a lot of things, believe it or not.”

“Oh, I believe it,” Stiles says absently, flipping the pages from “kanima” to “kelpie” to “kitsune” in the bestiary, which he’s propped open on his blanketed knees. “So I’m gathering they didn’t get along with wolves all that well, based on what Kira said about her mom.”

“Japanese wolves, including werewolves, went extinct in the 1800s, and they never got along well with foxes. And the foxes were more attached to the land; they have an affinity with nature that the Japanese wolves didn’t. There were centuries-long fights over territory.”

“Mm,” Stiles says, distracted by the picture accompanying the book’s description of kitsune. There’s an etching of a woman in a simple white robe, smiling in what strikes him as a sly, mysterious way. To her right is a red fox that looks perfectly normal except that along with its one natural tail, it has an aura around it made of light with demarcations that seem to suggest other tails hidden just out of sight. Stiles thinks he sees something else in the picture—a foxlike shadow cast by the light of the kitsune’s tails. He blinks and it’s gone.

“..faithful wives,” Derek is saying, “so I think that would translate to faithful friends, exceptionally loyal. Stiles, I told Lydia and Allison this yesterday, so why are you asking me?”

They might be back by now, he’s slept so long, but he says, “They’re out.” In the woods for target practice, which Stiles finds an odd date, though a practical one. 

“Where’s Scott?”

“He was at lacrosse trials with Kira since she wanted to try out, and then he was going to see if they could grab dinner together.”

“You didn’t go with them to tryouts?”

“Nah,” Stiles says. “I had more homework than usual because I missed yesterday, and I’m working more hours at the shop this semester than I was last year, so lacrosse is, like, maybe not a good idea this year, I don't know.” Really it’s because he’d been so bone-tired he wanted to lie on the late afternoon sun pooling on his bed and sleep as deeply as possible. 

To distract himself from the pit in his stomach at the thought of Scott playing without him this year, Stiles examines the picture in the bestiary. His eyes catch a detail they missed before: the artist drew the woman and the fox with slim, black lines around their necks, suggesting a necklace with a small circle glowing in the center. He opens his mouth to ask Derek about it, but Derek speaks first, his tone suggesting he’s as surprised as Stiles to hear the words coming out of his own mouth.

“I think, based on what we know about kitsune, it might not be a bad idea to be her friend.” 

“Um, hello? I’m sorry, I thought I was talking to Derek Hale, maybe you’ve seen him—leather jacket, scrunchy eyebrows, an incredibly obnoxious blend of grouchy and broody—“ 

“I’m just saying,” defensively, “the more allies you have against whatever’s coming after the Nematon, the better. Kitsune are...well, they’re not trustworthy. But if they decide you’re trustworthy, they’re loyal in return.”

Stiles is smirking now. “So, strategically speaking…”

“Strategically speaking, it’s the right call.” When Stiles doesn’t answer, Derek says, “That’s all I’m saying.”

“I hear you,” Stiles says, not successfully keeping the glee out of his voice. “But you're the one who has to tell Lydia, not me.”

“Anymore weird dreams?” Derek says, and the smile slides off Stiles’ face. 

“No,” he says. “At least, not like the ones we were talking about.” He hesitates, then takes a breath. “What about you?”

“Nothing.” 

He doesn’t know whether to be reassured—Derek’s not getting hurt—or worried—the fact that he’s not definitely supports the idea that there’s some link between them that Stiles’ dream-self is exploiting. “And that scar? I didn’t make that up, right? I totally saw it. Is it still there?”

“It doesn’t hurt, Stiles.”

“But it’s still there,” he says, stomach sinking. He still can’t figure out how the hell he’d managed—or how his evil alter-ego dream-self had managed—to accidentally do so much damage he’d left a fucking _permanent scar_ on a fucking _werewolf_ who was an entire continent away.

“You don’t know it’s permanent,” Derek says. “And it’s not like you were evil in those dreams I had.”

“What was I, then?” he says.

Derek’s silent a second before answering. “Scared. And I was scared too. Not scared for me—scared for you.”

Stiles opens his mouth to say something—that he hates the thought of Derek worrying over him, even though it makes him feel warmer than he’s felt all week; that Derek doesn’t need to be scared; that Stiles is fine. But for once, the lie won’t roll off his tongue. He closes his mouth and listens to the waves sifting across the sand all around Derek. 

 

The long week limps towards the weekend, each day leaving him more worn than the day before. It doesn’t matter how many blankets he piles on his bed or how much hot coffee he drinks or how many sweaters he stashes in his locker; he’s always cold. Incessantly cold. Cold shot through his veins and down to his bones. He’s turning to ice from the inside out and pictures ice crystals coating his ribs and frost slowly climbing his lungs. 

He doesn’t wake up with fire in his hands anymore. Instead, each night, he dreams himself walking through the preserve, one flame-filled hand held inches away from his face to illuminate the step or two in front of him. The flickering light flings shadows against the trees. They peer after him and gnash their pointed teeth as he passes on stealthy feet.

Through the trees, he hears things.

Once, oddly, the sea through the tree boughs to his right and someone turning over in a well-worn, squeaky bed in their sleep. Another time, a whispered prayer in a language he thinks he shouldn’t understand but somehow does— _accept my offering, protect my child, show me…_ Once, someone whose voice he nearly recognizes repeating _for the greater good, for the greater good,_. And, sometimes, something on four legs stalking him through the trees, its breath hungry. When he hears it he stops moving, extinguishes his flame, and holds his breath until it passes. There's a sense of something else there, too; something beside him, solid like a pillar he could lean against. But it's never there when he turns to look at it.

He wakes up with the muscles in his legs twitching, his feet kicking. Wakes with his heart throbbing and his ears pricked to the sound of the thing tracking him through the woods. Wakes with words on the tip of his tongue that spark and smolder but turn to smoke before he can remember them and spit them out. 

 

Scott always falls in love like he’s doing it for the first time: head over heels, stars in his eyes, open and trusting. The kid has the least guarded heart of anyone Stiles has ever known, and Stiles loves him for it—who else was going to befriend the odd six-year-old who couldn’t sit still in class and was constantly in trouble for it or else hyperventilating in the corner of the playground at recess, frantically trying to breathe with his head between his knees? Scott latched on to Stiles and never let him go, and Stiles has tried his damndest to keep Scott alive and protect him from psychopaths like Peter and Kate and Gerard fucking Argent because in the end this is all Stiles’ fault, isn’t it? He’s the one who dragged Scott to the woods and then left him behind, and even then Scott wouldn’t let him go even though Stiles has never not been able to throw himself headfirst into catastrophe, towing Scott down with him.

Kira sits with them at lunch every day. She makes the lacrosse team, spends two weeks after school training her heart out before the first game, comes over on weekends for pack movie nights where Scott stares at her adoringly. She glances back, blushing, when he’s not looking, and the rest of them participate in a group text that excludes Scott but includes Derek and Cora and features a pack-wide betting pool on when Scott and Kira will hold hands. 

As Lydia thaws, Kira’s bright, bubbly personality starts to shine through. She’s the perfect complement to Isaac’s sarcasm and Scott’s overenthusiastic optimism. She'd probably even counterbalance Derek’s moodiness, if he were around to benefit from the ray of sunshine that is Kira Yukimura.

Scott hasn’t had much success talking with her mom. She slams the door if he comes near the house and refuses to let him in. Kira passes on what meager information she can, but it’s not much—the more time Kira spends with the pack, the less inclined her mom is to let her in on any secrets. Stiles gets the sense that it’s tough in the Yukimura household right now with Kira’s human dad playing uneasy peacekeeper, though it’s hard for Stiles to picture ray-of-sunshine Kira being genuinely upset with anyone.

If Stiles were feeling up to it, he’d try to coach Scott in the art of manipulation. Under usual circumstances, he could help Scott cajole and annoy and manipulate himself into Noshiko Yukimura’s—well, if not her good graces or her confidence, into enough of her secrets to piece together what’s going on.

But he’s too tired. Every time he blinks he sees the ghosts of pine trees on the back of his eyelids, waiting for him to slip into an exhausted, icy sleep so they can swallow him again. 

And the moments in between him closing his eyes to blink and opening them again seem to be getting longer. He blinks and he’s in his first period biology class, then he blinks again and it’s lunch, and he has a pen in hand while he checks his math homework against Lydia’s. Blinks again and he’s home with his dad watching Poltergeist. He’s curled up under a blanket on the couch with his head on his dad’s shoulder, and his dad’s arm is around him so Stiles can absorb all the body heat he can. He sees his reflection in the TV; it shifts away from his dad even though Stiles doesn’t move. He blinks again and he’s fallen back into the winding path through the forest, full dark with no stars, hearing whispers through the trees in voices he almost recognizes. 

On the third Saturday after school starts, it’s Stiles’ turn to host pack movie night again. He works six hours at the coffee shop, barely keeping his eyes open, and finally slouches his way home in the cool, yellow autumn air, shoulders braced and neck bowed against the chill. He briefly considers walking upstairs before deciding he’s too tired to take another step, so he crashes on the couch instead. 

He wakes up with a start at six, when his phone vibrates with a text the exact moment someone knocks at the door. He grabs the phone and glances at the screen to see a text from Derek. He starts to grin and yawns instead, then heads to the door, wrapping the blankets he was sleeping under around himself.

There’s a tall, brown-haired boy standing on the porch. He looks like he’s in his late teens, maybe early twenties, and he’s dazzlingly, devastatingly handsome. 

“Hi! Am I early?” the kid asks.

Stiles stares at him blankly. “Hello, and it’s nice to meet you, too, random handsome stranger. To be perfectly honest with you, I have no idea who you are or what you want with me, and you should probably know that my father is the sheriff of this great town, so I hope you’re a law-abiding citizen and not some nefarious—“ Then he notices the black ribbon around the boy’s neck and its attendant pearl.

“Jesus _fuck, _” he says with feeling, “Kira?”__

The kid grins mischievously. “Maybe,” he says.

It’s not like he blinks and she changes into her regular self. It’s also not like her features melt and shift and rearrange themselves into Kira’s face. Instead, it’s like he’s looking at the boy who must be Kira, and then he’s looking at the Kira he knows. 

“Jesus fuck,” he says again. “What the shit was that?”

Kira steps through the front door and closes it behind her. “That was me hiding my trail so my mom wouldn’t know that when I said I was going out, what I meant was I was hanging out with Scott and his pack.” She smiles, her face more foxlike than usual. 

He has a vague memory of Derek telling him kitsune could shape-shift. “Can’t your mom shape-shift too? Wouldn’t that make her more, I don’t know, qualified to figure out who you were?”

“A hundred years ago, maybe. But she can’t shape-shift as well as I can anymore.”

“Is that a hint of smugness I detect? Why, Kira, I’m shocked. Here I was thinking you were all sunshine and sugar and spice and everything nice.”

“Stop it,” she says, her face turning pink with a mix of embarrassment and pleasure. “She’s just too…old. She’s had that same form for so long that she doesn’t know how to turn into something else at this point, so she usually doesn’t.”

“Why’d you turn into some random dude, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“It’s just kind of fun,” she says. “Being someone who everyone looks at totally differently than I usually do when I’m me. But no matter what I change into, it’s not hard. I can really do whatever. Look, I’ll do you.”

That same shift happens—he’s looking at Kira, and then suddenly, he’s looking at himself. An exact replica, down to the last freckle. The only thing out of place is his smile, which is broader and more genuine than his smile usually is. Then the expression on his face twists, and he’s watching himself frown.

“Stiles, are you okay?” His mirrored self has turned back into Kira, who’s gripping his arm. Damn, that girl works out. She could probably hold him up with that one wrist around his arm alone. What he wouldn’t give to see her arm-wrestle Cora Hale. He has no idea who’d win that match. 

“Derek Hale’s sister, right?” Kira says. She looks timid and anxious again. “The one from Argentina. Are you okay, Stiles? All the blood drained out of your face. You should sit down.” 

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” he tries to wave her off, but he appreciates that she keeps her grip on his arm. “Oh, listen to that, another knock,” he says. “Let’s get that.”

They head to the door, where Erica, Boyd, and Isaac are waiting. 

He blinks, and suddenly he’s talking to Kira in the corner of his living room. Something smells delicious—Boyd must be making green chili pork or something like it in the kitchen, where Scott, Isaac, and Erica presumably are with him. Lydia and Allison are curled up on the couch. 

“Stiles?” Kira says, looking at him with concern.

“Oh. Sorry,” he says, refocusing on her face and trying to cover up the fact that he has no idea what the fuck is happening. “What were we talking about?”

“You asked me about my necklace,” she says, the line of concern between her eyebrows deepening.

“Right, right,” he says. “I remember. So, what’s it about? It’s not just a necklace, right?”

“Right,” she says, a little warily. “I was showing you a picture on my phone.”

“Yes. Your phone. Right.” He realizes the phone in his hand isn’t his, and he lifts it to look at the screen. There’s a picture of a stone fox statue outside of what looks like a temple or shrine. The fox is holding something in its mouth—a bauble made of crystal or glass instead of stone.

“So I was already saying this, but the stone is a kind of…representation of the soul. Specifically, a kitsune’s soul.”

“Just a representation, huh?” he says.

“Mmhm,” Kira says, but in spite of being over 200 years old she’s a terrible liar, and all it takes is a raised eyebrow on his part for her to say, “Okay, fine, it’s not just a symbol, but I really, really, really shouldn’t talk about it. I mean, my mom would freak. It’s kind of supposed to be a secret.”

“I get it,” he says. “Safer that way. Assuming the werewolves in the other room were too busy to overhear you, your secret is safe with me.” He locks his mouth and throws away the key. Kira giggles.

“No wonder you and Scott get along so well,” he says in a conspiratorial whisper. “He practically wears his heart on his sleeve, and it's kinda like you wear yours around your neck.”

“You really think he likes me?”

Stiles stares at her incredulously. “Do I think the sun is going to rise tomorrow? Do I think Isaac’s going to wake up and think hm, it looks sunny out there, I’d better throw on a scarf? Do I think Erica is going to use the fact that you also like anime to her advantage and force everyone in this room to finally watch Akira tonight? Do I think Boyd will love it and Lydia will hate it and the rest of us will fall somewhere in the middle?”

Kira blinks. “Um, I’m guessing the answer to all of those questions is…yes?”

“Stiles, it sounds like you're being an asshole.” Lydia says from the couch. She’s highlighting something on her kindle—probably a sentence in a textbook—and has her feet in Allison’s lap. “Stop being an asshole. Kira, he's easy to get back at. Just say 'Derek' and he'll turn bright red."

“Derek Hale?” says Kira blankly. “The old alpha?”

“Stiles likes him,” Allison says.

“But they’re absolutely unbearable about it,” Lydia adds. “You’ve never met such obstinate, stubborn, emotionally stunted, sexually frustrated—“ 

“Who?” Stiles sputters. “Me? Like Derek Hale? He wouldn’t—I would _never_ —“ 

The phone in his pocket vibrates with a text. He hands Kira back hers and reaches for his back pocket. 

“Ten dollars says it’s from Derek,” Allison says.

“Sweetheart, no one would take that bet,” says Lydia without looking up from her eBook.

Stiles glances at the screen. “Ha! It’s Cora.”

“Ten bucks says it’s a picture of Derek, then,” Allison says. 

It is. Cora’s in the picture too, snapping a selfie, but she made sure Derek was in the background. They’re both sitting at the kitchen table, and Derek’s leaning back in his chair biting on a pen. Stiles thinks that’s a crossword puzzle sitting on the table in front of him. Damn. The man can work a white v-neck like no one Stiles has ever seen. 

He assumes the rising flush on his neck is enough to confirm Allison's suspicions, but before he can respond, Scott pokes his head in the living room. “Boyd says dinner’s ready!” he crows. He's wearing Stiles' personal favorite of his tacky apron: it reads _I put the hor in hors d'oevures._ "Nice look, buddy," Stiles calls after him. Lydia snorts, Kira giggles, and Allison puts her hand over her mouth to hide a smile. 

Stiles blinks.

When he opens his eyes, they're watching Akira. He’s sitting next to Scott on the couch, and Scott is sitting next to Kira. When he leans slightly forward, Stiles can see that their hands are just a few centimeters apart on the cushions.

Boyd and Erica must have pulled the lovesac out of the closet at some point because they’re both flopped across it. Isaac’s lanky body is sprawled on the carpet. 

Along with the jeans and long-sleeved shirt he was wearing before, Stiles is now wearing two sweaters and a pair of slippers and has a blanket around his shoulders like a shawl. Even sitting next to space-heater Scott, he’s freezing.

Stiles notices a glow and glances down at his hands. He’s holding his phone, his fingers poised just above the keyboard. Frowning, he looks at what he’s been typing.

_help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help help ___

The same word over and over and over again, maybe a hundred times, in a text addressed to Derek. Hands shaking, he deletes the whole thing.

He blinks again, and everyone’s gone home for the night. He’s alone.

 

His good days get more and more infrequent as September drags on. He thinks he’s doing an okay job of lying to cover it up, even if he drinks so much caffeine to stay awake during school that he’s developed a permanent twitch in his right eye. He honestly doesn’t know how he’s doing it—his lying skills are top-notch, it’s true, but he shouldn’t be able to fool an entire pack of werewolves with super-senses and humans operating at the caliber of _Lydia fucking Martin_ into thinking he’s fine when he’s clearly, _clearly_ not. 

But somehow, whether it’s the caffeine or the semi-plausible excuses for not hanging out or the fact that everyone is still frantic about Deaton missing or nervous about how the town really ought to have attracted more dark creatures by now based on Deaton’s dire Nematon warnings, he’s slipping under their radar. Most noticeably, he’s slipping under Scott’s. He seems to have taken Stiles’ word for it that he’s fine, and he spends more and more time with Kira and has less and less time to observe Stiles anyway. (Typically, the ever-observant, freakishly accurate Boyd won the betting pool by accurately guessing Scott and Kira would hold hands on September 27th directly after second period, on their way to lunch). 

Some parts of life stay relatively normal. Allison and Lydia drag him and Kira to a pumpkin patch on a clear Sunday in late September while the rest of the pack is out running through the woods. They wander around and look at the fantastical entries in the best-scarecrow contest, evaluating the entries in each category: scariest, most unique, and most authentic, whatever the hell that means. They check out the display of large, misshapen pumpkins, which showcases a few orange monsters that must weight 300 pounds and that Stiles thinks could probably crush you if they suddenly became sentient and rolled onto you Attack-of-the-Killer-Tomatoes style. He says as much, and Lydia rolls his eyes at him while Allison and Kira giggle.

Allison and Lydia hold hands while they walk around the pumpkin patch. Kira links arms with Stiles and pulls him over to look at the display of fall flowers—amber marigolds and gold chrysanthemums and a soft, feathery purple plant Kira tells him is heather. The scent reminds him of his mom. 

They buy fresh apples and pile pumpkins in the back of the Jeep, perfect for porch decorations now and ripe for carving in a few weeks. Stiles sorts through the pumpkin patch’s selection of small, decorative gourds; he wants Derek’s cactus and spider plant to have some festive seasonal company in his room. He chooses a yellow gourd with a crooked neck, a miniature acorn squash with orange stripes, and a white pumpkin the size of his palm. 

His fingers are so cold they’re stiff. It’s hard to force them straight and then curl them around stems to pick up the pumpkins. But his phone vibrates in his pocket every once in a while with a message from Derek or Cora. He and Allison and Kira drag Lydia into the miniature corn maze, and Stiles makes them read all the terrible pun-y jokes on signs placed strategically amid the corn. He can’t feel the sunlight touching his skin, but it’s so bright he almost feels warmer anyway watching the light gild the leaves and the silk strands on the ears of corn. It’s the best day he’s had in a long time. 

 

But the blackouts get worse. By the start of October, there aren’t many times he stays fully present—less and less, all the time. 

Floundering, he grasps at an unlikely anchor: Derek’s books.

He has no memory of doing his homework, no memory of watching movies he knows he must have with the pack or his dad, no recollection of the video games he’s played with Allison and Scott and Erica and Kira. But Derek’s books keep him focused and tethered like nothing else seems to. 

He’s always been as fast of a reader as Lydia—maybe slightly faster, if less thorough—but it hardly matters when he can rarely stay focused enough to finish an entire book in one sitting. Plus, his brain snaps things together too fast. He figures out the conclusion before the book gets there and he spends the intervening pages bored, unable to keep his gaze and mind from wandering.

But now, as the gaps in his memory multiply and he shivers his way through endless gray days, trying his best not to draw the pack’s attention and worry, he clutches at the books like a lifeline. And somehow when he reads, he’s there, finally settled in his own skin, his frantic, frenzied, increasingly blank mind briefly focused. 

He rereads Derek’s third Harry Potter book one Tuesday afternoon, savoring each sentence and every minuscule mark its owner left behind. Along with the tiny tear on the front cover, there’s the smallest crease on the page where Sirius says, “We would have died! Died rather than betray our friends!” There’s a tiny spot of water damage, yellowed with age, on the final page.

Derek included his copy of The Hobbit, so Stiles reads that too. He reads The Once and Future King in four sittings, dying to know if Arthur and Lancelot and Guinevere and Gawain will be redeemed at the end or not; reads Derek’s obsessively annotated copy of a book called My Antonia, which he’s pretty sure he was supposed to read sophomore year but he got too bored and got by on Lydia’s notes instead. He reads the short books like A Farewell to Arms and the long books like the hundreds of pages for Borges short stories.

He does his best not to think about what he’ll do when he finally reaches the end of the box.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song for this chapter: "Welcome Home," Radical Face.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a tiny, tiny note: tw on this chapter for suicidal ideation. It's about two sentences long in the middle. I'll write a slightly longer note at the end if it would help you to have a more thorough explanation. Please be safe and careful! I love you. <3
> 
> chapter 6: going back in time to chapter 4, but from Derek's perspective this time.

Derek is intimately, achingly familiar with guilt and all the forms it takes: the heavy weight of it on his chest at night, the shadows dogging his footsteps during the day, the dark whispers weaving their way in and out of his dreams. He knows how guilt turns every bite of food into dust in your mouth and transforms every stranger’s glance into an accusation.

So when he hears it in Stiles’ voice, his first instinct is to grab at it, pull it away and absorb it himself. 

“I’m sorry,” Stiles says. “I’m—“ 

“Don’t say fine,” Derek cuts him off. Stiles sounds tired, worn. “You’re not.” 

“Uh, okay,” say Stiles. “Well, I’m not fine, but I’m, like, fine-ish for someone who was frozen half to death yesterday.”

Frozen _to_ death, according to Lydia. For a second he's transported back to the hospital watching Cora’s blood turn black, knowing Stiles, Scott, and Allison are all about to do something incredibly stupid and incredibly brave and incredibly unlikely to work.

That had been a long day.

“You should have called,” he says.

“I know,” Stiles says. 

He’s not there to feel the cold rolling off of Stiles and gauge for himself how serious it is. He can’t tell if he smells like anything other than cinnamon and lavender and cloves and pine and something else uniquely Stiles that he’s never been able to name. He can’t grab Stiles’ wrist and count the heartbeats and let them convince him that for now, at least, Stiles is fine, here, alive. So instead of letting Stiles fall into their typical sniping, he says, “Stiles. Tell me how you are.”

“Alright. If you really want to know, I feel like I got hit by a truck. I mean I feel like I’m covered in bruises but there aren’t actually any bruises so it’s kind of like a bunch of ghosts used me as a punching bag or something.”

Presumably, that that trainwreck of similes is Stiles-speak for _I feel like shit._ Derek says, “And you’re cold.” _Stiles, you’re going to have to be more specific._

“Yes. I’m cold. This is about what you told everyone last night, right?” Now he sounds apprehensive. “Look, Deaton explained this to me, it’s not like sparks have a literal, actual connection to fire, the name is just a metaphor for the way sparks jumpstart magic. It doesn’t make sense to try to kill me with a fucking cold front because I’m not, like, some magical fire being—“

“Except for when you are.”

“Says who?”

“Says Allison.” Stiles must hear the chilly undercurrent in his tone, because Derek’s words bring him up short. 

“Jesus, Derek,” Stiles says. Almost a plea. Then Stiles is talking and apologizing in a mad rush, recounting his dreams and his fear and his fire and Derek knows the same way Stiles does that something is going on between them, something neither of them can explain. It sounds terrifying to him—not being burned himself, but feeling out of control the way Stiles clearly does right now—so he doesn’t understand what Stiles means when he says “it’s fine, it doesn’t hurt me” or why Stiles sounds more afraid for Derek than he does for himself. All he knows is that Stiles’ voice is dripping with panic and shame and fear, and that he wants it to stop.

“Stiles,” he says, “I’m not scared of you.”

“Yeah, well, you should be. I mean, I’m scared of me, and apparently someone else is too, or else why would that whole shitstorm have gone down like it did yesterday, and why would Deaton say the shit he did and then disappear, and…”

“I’m not scared of you,” he says. “I’m scared _for_ you.”

His wolf prowls through the corners of his brain, antsy and on edge, picking up on something in Stiles’ tone that Derek’s human self is missing. More than anything, it wants to be home. Protecting him. Making sure he’s safe and secure with the rest of the pack. And so he says as much.

“No!’ Stiles yelps. “Please don’t come back Derek. Please. Please.”

He hadn’t realized how much he wanted to hear the opposite until the words turn him numb. He should have known. Scared _for _you? Nothing fuck-it-all-to-hell Stiles would ever want to hear. What an idiot, thinking Stiles would care if he came back or stayed, when no one wants him there, least of all Stiles. It’s no wonder, Derek thinks; he can’t even stand himself, so how could anyone else—__

“Oh geez, not like that, you idiot, of course I want you around,” Stiles says, and his brain halts its downward spiral, waiting to hear what comes next.

Stiles explains. Derek listens. He thinks he understands. His wolf stops pacing.

 _I want you around, I want you around._ The words repeat in his head.

Stiles says, “But you know what I’m talking about, right? I know something’s happening to me, Derek, and I know I’m doing something to you too.”

Derek knows. He knows they're sharing dreams and he knows Stiles is reaching across continents in his sleep to hold onto Derek with skin that burns. He also knows there’s nothing either of them can do about it right now. “Nothing that can’t be fixed.” 

“But—“

“Stiles. Go back to sleep.” 

And he grumbles and he moans, but he does. And Derek hangs up. 

 

The next morning, after his run, he’s standing on his head with his eyes closed when Cora comes into his room. He opens his eyes to look at her.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Yoga,” he says. “And meditation.”

“Upside down?”

“Yes.”

“It’s—you do yoga?”

“Yep,” he says, and pushes himself away from the wall and lets his toes brush the floor. He sits up. “What’s up?”

“Luisa wants to talk to you about something.” She coughs, and Derek frowns at her. She’s been coughing more in the last few days. He can feel the slight heat coming off of her; her temperature’s back up a few degrees. 

“Stop that,” she says. Those Hale eyebrows narrow at him. “I’m fine.”

“Someone should tell you and Stiles that hearing _I’m fine_ over and over and over again from people who clearly aren’t is obnoxious.” 

“Right, because you never lie about feeling fine. You're right, I don’t feel great, but I’m not gonna die.”

“Doesn’t mean you’re fine.”

“Fine enough. Let it go. Put your shirt on and follow me or I’m taking a picture and texting it to Stiles.”

He raises an eyebrow at her. “You do that?”

“Sure do."

“Did he ask you to?”

“No. That would be creepy.”

He has a lot of questions, but he doesn't know which one to start with, so he grabs a tank top and follows Cora to the main part of the house.

Luisa’s peeling oranges in the kitchen with Benjamin, who’s sitting across the table from her with his eyes barely the height of the edge. 

When Derek moves towards Luisa to grab an orange and help peel, Benjamin’s eyes flicker over to him. He disappears from his seat and materializes at Derek’s feet, the solemn expression still on his face as he stretches his arms up.

Derek bends to pick him up, then glances over at Luisa when she laughs. “That boy is very choosy about his friends,” she says in Spanish. “His clinginess is not a gift to be taken lightly.”

As soon as Derek picks him up, Benjamin almost wriggles out of his grasp by twisting his entire body around and lurching towards the table to grab an orange segment, which he touches to Derek’s lips. Derek opens his mouth obediently to eat it. Benjamin looks approving.

“Whatever,” Cora says, continuing the conversation in Spanish. She pulls out a chair at the table and sits. “I’m still his favorite aunt.”

“You’re everyone’s favorite aunt,” Luisa says, grinning at her.

Derek has some mental block that makes him forget that Cora thinks of everyone here as her family. Luisa’s her sister-in-law, Benjamin’s her nephew, Gabriel’s her father. He swallows against the feeling rising in his throat.

“So, Derek,” Luisa says, turning back to him. “Cora was telling me about your pack’s problems back home. I was thinking I could help you a little bit.”

He doesn’t know what to say to that. He settles on, “You’re not just a werewolf. You’re a witch too, correct?”

“Yes,” she says. “Though I’m not a light like your friend.” It takes him a second to put the piece together and figure out that “luz” must be the regional term for spark. It makes sense. No one shines brighter than Stiles. “That situation you remember from your childhood—I remember a similar one from mine.” 

“You do?” 

She nods.

“And did you…did your pack do the same thing as mine?” _Did they murder whoever was murdering the sparks,_ he means, but he can’t remember the Spanish word for “murder.”

She shakes her head. “I grew up in Colombia, and I was about 14 when it happened. My pack wasn’t…” she pauses for a second. “They weren’t guardians the way your mother’s pack was. When we started finding bodies on our hunts, we didn’t do anything about it, and then one of our pack members who was also a spark was killed. I was a witch, and so the pack suspected me.”

“Your own pack?” he says. 

“Like I said, they weren’t like your pack at all, or like Gabriel’s pack either. They chased me out of town.”

“Out of the country,” Cora adds. “I don’t know them, but I fucking hate them.”

Luisa smiles at her. “They weren’t the best. But far from the worst. They could have killed me.”

“Right," Cora says, "they sure met the basic standard of human decency, not killing innocent people.”

Derek shifts Benjamin to his other hip. The two-year-old clings to Derek’s neck, his warm weight comforting. “They suspected you because you were a witch…so that means they at least figured out a witch was doing it?”

“It had to have been a group of witches, not one individual,” she says. “But not our local coven, clearly, or they would have been easier to find.”

“Did anyone survive?” 

She shakes her head. “The bodies we found were ice-cold, their hearts stopped.” 

So Stiles is the only one who’s lived through it. Why? “Was there anything else weird about the bodies or the way they were killed?”

“One thing. They didn’t kill every single spark living in the city—only a select few, and I don’t know how they chose which to kill. They left the bodies in alleys, dumpsters, out-of-the way places. But no matter where we found the body, we found a small mark next to it.”

“A mark?”

“A spiral,” she says, “burnt into the ground with a slash through it. Wherever your friend was attacked, if you go back to the spot, I’m guessing you’ll find one there.”

“What does it mean?” 

“I have a theory,” she says. “The circle of three—you have that sign in California? Our symbol?” He nods, thinking of the triskelion on his back. “I think the single spiral with a mark through the middle is meant to be a corruption of the sign of unity. Whatever this group is who kills sparks, they think of themselves as the only true guardians, that others are perversions or corruptions.”

“What’s corrupt about a...light?” The ones he’s met have all been harmless—they’re like Stiles, helpful in enhancing other people’s powers, capable of performing minor spells. He’s rarely known a spark to hurt someone.

“Nothing,” Luisa says. “The light in our pack was the kindest, one of the only ones who didn’t believe in shows of dominance or power plays. He was like me; he believed we had been given a gift that made us strong enough to protect humans who couldn’t protect themselves. He wasn’t right for that pack. If the witches who killed him hadn’t, our alpha would have.”

Benjamin squirms to be put down, so Derek lowers him to the floor. The boy wanders into the main room and comes back with a handful of wooden blocks. He sits at Derek’s feet and starts to stack them. Luisa smiles at him.

“He’s a clever boy, this one,” she says. “And we think a light as well, like his uncle Tomas. Isn’t that right, mjio?” 

Derek hears someone else’s footsteps on the stairs and tenses. The movement doesn’t go unnoticed by either of the other werewolves in the room. 

“I think the pack’s going to go on a run this evening, if you want to join us,” Luisa says. “In the meantime, I think some of the kids were wanting to swim after breakfast. It’s warm enough for the wolves.”

“We could take them,” Cora volunteers. “Only if you want, Der.”

It’s nice of them to give him an out. “Sure,” he says. “That’d be nice.”

His phone vibrates in his pocket. It’s a text from Stiles. He fell asleep on Scott’s couch, apparently, and spent the night there. Now he’s heading back to his house. _prob going 2 work this afternoon,_ he says. _whats up on your end? how r things?_

“You can go chill in your room if that’s what you want, and I’ll come get you when the kids are all ready,” Cora says. He nods. He’ll call Scott, ask him to head back up to the clinic and look for the symbol Luisa described. He’s not sure how much it will help them, but it’s the closest thing to a lead they’ve got. 

 

The more time he spends with Cora’s pack, the more he finds himself thinking of Laura. Since he came back to Beacon Hills, his life has been a non-stop whirlwind of bloody fights and near-death experiences and sarcasm that slips under his skin into his dreams. It’s the opposite of his quiet semester at Columbia and apartment with Laura, the rhythm of his life abruptly called off by her body on the cold ground. 

Now that the pace of his life has slowed, filled mainly with the sounds of his baby sister’s laugh and the chatter of happy, healthy werewolf kids in the other room and the sea rushing in and out just beyond his window and Stiles’ voice on the phone, he finally has the time to take a breath and let her death settle into him. 

He’s gotten so used to self-loathing tied up in aching for his dead family that simply missing someone and not feeling completely responsible for their death feels foreign. He misses her, misses their weekend card games, the way she’d lean her head against his shoulder when they’d watch the worst, most over-the-top slasher movies she could find because she thought they were funny, the way she perfectly complemented his tendency to turn inward with her extroverted personality. 

Stiles would have gotten along with her as well as he gets along with Cora, though for different reasons. Cora is brash where Laura was loud but never aggressive. Cora loves to be in the center of a group while Laura was content to stay at the edges, not because she was broody like Derek but because she wanted to make sure everyone, including those at the fringes, felt included. Cora loves video games and martial arts and pizza where Laura loved kale smoothies and yoga practice and Jane Austen novels. They had the same favorite color (green) and the same utterly ridiculous, raucous laugh.

It’s been a while since he wished he’d been the one buried in the ground instead of Laura. But the thought still prods at him sometimes, along with the dreams of his family members dead in the fire. They stare at him with hollow eyes all night long, and when day breaks, they turn to smoke. 

He hadn’t expected to find absolution from Cora. He didn’t expect forgiveness; he only wanted the chance to look after her, like Laura had looked after him. But as the month goes by, it feels like Cora is taking care of him, not the other way around.

Maybe it’s because she’s in her element and he’s out of his. Maybe it’s that she’s grown around in a family that’s caring and accepting and kind, among people like Luciano and Gabriel who are exceptionally attuned to the emotions of others, while Derek learned to close himself off. He learned it doubly once Laura was dead. 

But Cora works at the crack in his practiced façade that Stiles and Scott and Allison and the rest had started to loosen. If he’s moodily reticent, she pulls him out of his shell and drags him out to the pack. If he’s fraying in the chaos and the noise, she sends him out on errands. She notices when he’s stuck in a mire of swirling dark thoughts. He usually doesn’t see her until she’s standing right beside him, and then she bends down and kisses him on the cheek. He always looks up startled by the happiness he sees on her face in spite of—or, he hopes, sometimes, a hope strong enough that he keeps it buried—because of him. And that’s that. 

He spends a lot of time on the road leading into town to pick up fruit at the outdoor market. He walks if he wants to be gone for longer and borrows Luciano’s rickety bike when he wants to move faster. While he walks, he reads—usually something in Spanish from the bookshelf in his room. He mutters the words out loud, trying to regain the cadence and vocabulary of the language.

As school starts back in Beacon Hills and California slips into fall, Argentina brightens into spring. The temperature edges towards an even 70 degrees, and the sun burns the fog off the ocean earlier and quicker each day. If it weren’t for the unease he feels about everyone at home or the anxiety that sometimes sends him away from Cora’s pack, back to his room where he can breathe without a tight chest and sit and read or unwind or call Stiles, he thinks he’d be something like happy here with Cora and her pack.

Scott, Isaac, Boyd, and Erica had gone back to the clinic the week before school started, looking for the spiral Luisa described. They found it beneath one of the waiting room chairs right next to the door, exactly where Stiles had fallen. Lydia’s tried researching it in every way she knows how; so far, she’s turned up nothing. Derek can tell how much it galls her by how terse her responses are to pack text messages.

Derek has a feeling in his gut that he should go back home. Stiles says he’s fine, but he’s clearly not—not if he’s not playing lacrosse, not if he’s sleeping every spare second instead of staying up all night and bouncing off the walls, not if his voice has an edge of tiredness to it every time he calls. 

But Scott insists things are fine, and he sounds honest when he says it, and Stiles says not to come back, and Cora wants him to stay. She doesn’t say it out loud, but he sees it in the way she looks at him sometimes and in the nearly imperceptible tension that enters her body when she mentions Beacon Hills.

It’s not like he doesn’t still see Stiles, though. He sees him almost every night.

He’d told Stiles he wasn’t having the dreams anymore, which is true—they aren’t the dreams like before. They’re different. And they’re worse.

Worse because what Stiles—the living, waking, breathing version of Stiles—doesn’t seem to understand is that the terrifying thing about the dreams wasn’t the fire. What’s a little pain to Derek? What’s life without scars? He fears fire, but not when it comes to him on Stiles' skin. He's always had a feeling that brushing against Stiles, skin on skin, would feel like fire to him anyway.

No. The terrifying part was always Stiles asking for his help and him unable to do anything about it. 

Nearly every night of September, he dreams himself in wolf form, trotting through the dark forest of the preserve at Stiles’ side. He can smell him—warm, homey, but with a shiver of black fear running through him that turns the night sour. He follows Stiles as he wanders down the path, cuts through trees and ducks under branches. Sometimes Stiles stops, stands stock still, and tilts his head like he’s listening to something Derek can’t hear. He keeps one hand raised in front of his face and filled with a pale, violet light that ripples on the ground like sunlight on the ocean.

Derek can see Stiles perfectly—can smell him, taste him on the air. Sometimes he brushes against his legs as he walks. And through it all, Stiles doesn’t notice him.

Not the night Stiles saw something through the trees and stopped, all the blood draining from his face. He stood there, sheet-white, as Derek growled and whined and barked at whatever ominous thing Stiles saw in the woods, but Stiles stayed frozen in that position until Derek woke up.

Not the night Stiles gasped, then suddenly crouched back behind a copse of trees and extinguished the light by curling his hand around it. He seemed to hold his breath, but then Derek heard him whispering, “Please, please, please, please, please,” the words getting more desperate the longer the two of them lingered beneath the trees.

Not the night when Stiles pushed pine branches back and stopped to listen to something Derek couldn’t hear. They stood there for a long time. Finally Derek tasted salt in the air and looked up to see that Stiles was staring straight ahead, crying. Derek nudged him, whined. The tears turned black and coursed down Stiles’ face. 

 

One night in late September, his phone rings in the middle of the night. Or a little past it—when he glances at the screen, it’s 4 a.m. Only midnight in California.

“I’m sorry,” Stiles says when Derek answers.

“For what?” Derek says. Part of his brain is still back in his dream. The scent of pine and dirt and rotting leaves fills the room. Tonight Stiles had tumbled into the dirt without warning, grasping at it white-knuckled as he gasped like he was running out of air. Derek had growled and barked and bumped Stiles’ chin with his wet nose trying to get him to look up, to see that he wasn’t alone. Nothing worked. 

“I’m sorry,” Stiles says again, but his voice is wrong—too quiet, too low-pitched. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m—“

“Stop it. Stop. What are you apologizing for?” 

Stiles talks faster as he repeats, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—“

“Stiles, stop,” Derek says again, loudly.

Stiles does. And then he starts to laugh, an eerie, quiet laugh so unlike his typical laugh that the hair stands up on Derek’s arms. _“Stiles,”_ he says, alarm raising his voice. 

The laugh rises and rises and a protective snarl grows in the back of Derek's throat until it bursts out as a harsh bark. The sound on the other end of the line cuts off abruptly. 

“Stiles?” Derek says into the silence.

“Derek?” Stiles responds, raspy with sleep. 

“Jesus,” Derek says, and runs a hand over his face. “Jesus Christ. What was that?”

“What was what?”

“Are you…were you asleep just now? Did you just wake up?”

“Maybe?” says Stiles. “I can’t…I can’t remember.”

“Do you remember calling me?”

“Nope,” Stiles says, “No, I just—fuck, what did I say, was it about—“

“It was nothing,” Derek says, closing his eyes and focusing on Stiles’ voice. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Derek, I’m not—“

“Stiles, don’t worry about it.” Derek doesn’t want to tip him into a panic attack; Stiles' breath is speeding up and hitching, his heartbeat stuttering. “Or try not to, anyway”

Stiles laughs once, harshly. “Have you met me? I don’t know how. Just tell me what happened.”

“Fine. You were repeating the same thing over and over. Apologizing. I think you were having a nightmare.”

“Were _you_ having one? When I woke you up by calling?”

He knows his silence answers the question. Stiles takes a breath, but Derek cuts him off with, “Do you think you can go back to bed? You need to sleep.” 

“I don’t want to.”

“You should.”

“I don’t fucking want to, Derek.” His breaths are getting shorter.

“Okay, then you need a distraction. Take your mind off it until you’re tired again.” 

“I finished all the books,” Stiles says, and it takes Derek a second to figure out which books he’s talking about.

“My books? The entire box?”

“All the distraction books. And all the apology books. All the distraction-apology books.”

“Stiles, I think—” 

He stops. There are words on the tip of his tongue—words he actually wants to say when Stiles calls and tells him not to come home. Words like _I’m so worried about you I can’t sleep either_

“You think what, Derek?” Stiles asks. He must have trailed off.

There are other words too. More important words. Selfish words he can't say when Stiles is about to have a panic attack and is exhausted and shouldn't have to deal emotions other than his own.

So he says, “Since you already read all the books I gave you, I could read you something from here. It would have to be in Spanish, though. My English ones are up in Cora’s room.”

Stiles is quiet for long enough that Derek has ample time to think about how stupid he sounds. Then, “Could you?” he finally says. “I mean, you don’t have to, if you’re busy or whatever, I can go back to sleeping, I don’t have to bother you, I can—“

“Stiles,” Derek says, “shut up.” 

He goes to the bookshelf and chooses one—a book of Neruda poems. “My Spanish isn’t very good,” he warns.

“Sadly, I won’t be able to tell the difference, in spite of taking like seven years of Spanish and being best friends with Scott since age six.” 

“That’s embarrassing for you. Now lie down,” Derek orders. 

“Nice,” Stiles smirks. “More forward than usual.” Nearly back to normal, now--anyone else would think he was, if they couldn't hear the short gasps punctuating the end of each sentence.

“If I’m going to read to you, it’s so you can go back to sleep.”

“Derek, I don’t want—“

“Lie down and listen to me.” 

“I can’t—“

“Stiles.” He pinches the bridge of his nose and closes his eyes. “I told you to shut up. Are you going to do what I say or not?”

“Not,” Stiles mutters. “You dick.” But Derek hears the mattress shift as he lies back down and pulls the covers back over himself. His teeth chatter a few times with cold before he clenches his jaw and makes himself stop. 

"Grab another blanket," Derek orders. "You need more than one."

"Ugh," Stiles says, but Derek hears him lean over the bed to take one from beneath the frame.

Stiles takes a breath to say something, but Derek says, “Shh.” And then he opens the book and starts to read. 

He reads poem after poem. He keeps reading, long after Stiles’ breath and heartbeat have slowed into the rhythms of sleep, and long after the first rays of sunlight turn his room rosy and warm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, lovelies! I'm so so sorry this took me so long to post; the next two updates should be ready to go much, much faster. You are all lovely humans and I appreciate you so much. <3
> 
> Song for this chapter: New Jerusalem, Bears Den
> 
> Next up: October's fine. Then, it isn't.
> 
> Longer explanation of tw: Derek thinks for a second about times in the past where he wishes he'd died instead of his family or, more recently, instead of Laura. I don't think he's suicidal at this point in his life; realizing he wants to be in Cora's life helps, as is being a person the rest of Scott's pack relies on. Well. One person in particular.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so incredibly sorry this chapter took me so long to post! I've been sitting on it for a week, but I've been stuck in this super depressive slump. I finally got it together enough to post it. The next chapter will be up MUCH quicker. Thanks for bearing with me, lovelies <3

He doesn’t read to Stiles every night, but near enough. They read more Neruda poems and start a Spanish-language version copy of The Fellowship of the Ring that Derek finds at the back of the bookshelf in his room. 

Stiles usually falls asleep after the first fifteen minutes of listening to Derek’s voice, his phone on the bedside table or clutched in his hand on speaker phone. Derek should probably hang up and try to sleep too, but most of the time he keeps reading, even though Stiles isn’t awake to hear him.

They talk about the dreams. “I’m there next to you,” he tries to tell Stiles, “every night. You really can’t tell I’m there?”

“Never,” Stiles says. “I mean, sometimes I think I hear something with four-ish legs off in the bushes, but I don’t think it’s you.”

“So what is it?

He pauses before answering. “Not sure yet.” 

“But?”

“But nothing good.” 

“Does it make you feel better or worse, knowing I’m there but not seeing me?”

“Worse,” Stiles says. “It means I’m dragging you with me somehow, but I can’t even see you to help you or get you out of it or—“

“Stiles, that doesn’t matter.”

“Only because you're a self-sacrificing idiot who spends way too little time thinking about himself, which is weird because that’s like the defining characters of most humans, who…”

“Stiles, if I were home, we could figure something out.”

“Without Deaton here? Who else is there to help us? I haven’t even told Lydia about it because I’m too freaked. I haven’t done that weird fire thing in a while, but we’re both having these same fucking dreams so I’m obviously still dangerous and I—”

“Talk to them, Stiles. They’re your pack. They already know some of the truth anyway.”

Stiles sighs. " _Our_ pack, Derek, not just mine. And no. I’m not going to. Not until I know for sure what it is.”

“Then I’m coming home.”

“Derek,” Stiles says. “Don’t.”

“Stiles, you’re not okay. Cora’s fine, I’ll see her again, and I should—“

“Derek, you can’t.”

No matter how often he hears that sentence or some variation on it, Derek’s brain always tacks on _because I don’t want you to_ at the end of it.

So he says, “I can hear you shivering. How many times do I have to tell you to put on another coat?” 

 

Everyone else in the pack texts him instead of calling. So when his phone rings in the middle of a clear Tuesday in mid-October, he answers it automatically, expecting it to be Stiles. He’s surprised to hear Scott’s voice instead.

“Hey, have you been getting these weird voicemails from Stiles?” Scott says.

Derek sets down his paint roller; he’s outside whitewashing the seaward side of the house with Bianca, Luisa and Luciano’s third-youngest child, who’s acting as his enthusiastic, if ineffective, painter in training. “Shouldn’t you be in class right now?” he asks. 

“You sound like my mom. Which totally makes sense, since we took a group poll and decided you and Allison are the pack moms, so you're like, super in character right now. But no, it’s the break between classes, and for some reason I keep forgetting to talk to you about this, so I wanted to do it real quick before I forget.”

“Talk to me about voicemails?”

“Yeah. Have you gotten any weird ones from Stiles, like, out of the blue?” 

“No,” Derek says. “What voicemails?”

“I’m gonna forward them to you. Is that okay? I don’t know what to do, man. He seems totally normal during the day, and then I randomly get these in the middle of the night. But then when I try to talk to him about it in the morning, he kind of looks at me and then, like, walks away, and it doesn’t seem like a big deal.” 

Derek suspects he’s only not getting the voicemails because he always answers the phone when Stiles calls. He hears a bell ring. “You should go. Send me those voicemails and get to class.”

“Sure thing, mom,” Scott says, and he hangs up.

Bianca’s gleefully flinging splotches of yellow paint across the dirt when the voicemails reach him. He opens the first one.

It’s silent for a few seconds save for Stiles’ breathing. Then, he says in a voice quieter and darker than his own, “When you kiss her, she tastes of lightning.” He hangs up.

The second starts abruptly. “Someone’s following me. Someone’s following me, Scott,” Stiles says. Then, “No, please, don’t, please—“ The message cuts off.

The third one is the longest. It starts off with Stiles whispering something softly enough that Derek can’t make it out. Then Stiles goes quiet and all Derek hears is his breath in the background until he starts laughing—that same eerie laugh Derek’s heard before, the one that sounds nothing like Stiles and sends chills up and down his spine. 

Derek forces himself to listen to the whole thing. Then he listens to each message again. 

The second time around, he can tell what Stiles says in the third message. “They have him now,” he whispers. “They have him. Soon, he’ll break.” And then, that laugh. 

When he’s done listening, he texts Scott, _listened to them, and they’re definitely weird. you're positive you haven’t noticed him doing anything else strange about him?_

Scott responds, _i super haven’t, i swear. he hangs out w/ us all the time, turns in his homework on time, makes us treats and stuff. he said he was still having weird dreams but that it was nbd and that he was feeling better._

_something’s off,_ Derek replies. _use all of your senses, not just your eyes. you have to trust me on this one._

A few minutes pass before he gets a reply.

_thx + will do. u know i trust u dude_

Stiles calls him almost nightly, too scared to sleep. Derek’s (or Stiles') dreams dog him during the day. He constantly thinks about going home, but the plea in Stiles’ voice stops him every time. 

But the combination of Scott’s trust and the spot of yellow on Bianca’s nose as she whirls in a giddy circle nearly make him smile anyway. 

 

Derek asks Stiles about it that night. The phone ringing wakes him up from a dream where he and Stiles had both been staring at a sign carved into a pine tree—a spiral with a line slashed through it like a cut, made so recently it was still oozing sap like blood. 

“Why do you keep leaving Scott weird voicemails?” Derek asks.

“Do I?” Stiles says. He sounds disoriented, voice still thick with dreams.

“Yep.” 

Stiles sighs. “What do I say in them?” Derek hears him shifting in the bed, rolling over to his other side. 

“In one of them, you said someone was following you. And in another one, you said, ‘he’ll break soon.’” When Stiles is silent, Derek says, “Do you have any idea what I’m talking about?”

“No,” Stiles says. “Not at all. Actually….wait, I—“ 

Suddenly, the tone of his voice shifts—shifts to _Lydia’s_ voice, sounding so like her in pitch, tone, and cadence that Derek almost doesn’t believe Stiles is the one talking. 

“Torture is a completely ineffective way to glean information. More often than not, it elicits false information, since the person being tortured is desperate to make the pain stop. If they don’t have the information their interrogators want, they’re likely to either say what their torturers want to hear or make up information plausible enough to temporarily stop the pain.”

Goosebumps rise on Derek’s arms. “I didn’t say anything about torture,” he says, trying to keep his tone even. “Is someone being tortured, Stiles?”

“I hear him screaming at night,” Stiles says, not in Lydia’s voice but his own, dreamy and detached. “Through the trees.” 

It must be one of the sounds Stiles listens to night after night while Derek keeps his silent, unseen vigil by his side. “Who, Stiles? Who do you hear screaming?” 

Stiles is silent for a moment. “I don’t remember." Then, in a voice weighted with tiredness and sleep and a hint of a chill Derek can nearly hear over the phone, he asks, “God. Read me something, Der?” 

So they pick up where they left off, Frodo running from the Ringwraiths through the rushing river, elves glowing like the sun. Once Stiles falls asleep, Derek listens to his quiet breathing as the seconds blur into minutes that blur into hours until the sun rises. 

 

The next afternoon, Derek and Cora shepherd the kids across the beach for a seaside picnic. Benjamin stays home with his grandpa for his nap, but all the other kids, who range in age from three to twelve, are happy to tag along with their favorite aunt (and, as Ana’s daughter Catalina whispered shyly in his ear the other night, their—or at least her—new favorite uncle). Diving seabirds’ calls blend with the surf. 

“Nice shades,” Cora says, linking her arm through his and bumping against him. 

“Nice shades yourself,” he says back.

The kids weave through the sand dunes until they finally reach the spot Cora was aiming for. The oldest kids were in charge of carrying the blankets; Rosario and Catalina spread their blankets out solemnly, while Mia and Matias, the twins, tangle themselves up in their respective blankets and then wrestle each other to the ground.

“Hey!” Cora calls, and the kids’ heads swivel around. “Food or no food?”

“Food!” the kids chorus back. 

“Then behave,” she says. The kids giggle, then go back to shrieking and pursuing each other through the sand dunes.

“No shifting until you eat!” Cora says, which brings most of them running back towards the blankets where Derek and Cora are opening up their backpack filled with sandwiches and fresh fruit. Cora lightly raps Lauturo on the hand as he tries to grab Bianca’s sandwich for himself. He grins cheekily and scampers after his cousins.

“So,” Cora says once each kid is happily paired with their sandwich of choice, “I think it's time to talk about how long you’re staying.”

He glances at her, but she’s looking down at the blanket. When they left, it was with the understanding that he’d stay with her pack for an undetermined, indefinite amount of time, and he didn’t know how to bring up the fact that his stay couldn’t be forever. “How long do you want me to stay?”

She shrugs. “I love having you here, you know.”

“I know,” he says, even though certainty feels odd.

“I need to study so I can catch up on the school I missed,” she says, “and then start applying to universities. That’s what I was doing before…well. You know.”

They’re silent for a beat, watching the kids. They’ve all devoured their sandwiches, and the werewolf kids are shucking clothes to shift and play while the humans, sparks, and witches fling sand at each other and run towards the receding tide. 

Cora clears her throat. “Anyway, I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t want you to feel pressured to stay here. Like, if you want to go back home and be with your pack and make sure Stiles really is okay, I totally understand. So you know you can leave, right?”

He knows he can. He just doesn’t know if he should. He doesn’t know what Laura would do in this same situation, or his mom. He doesn’t know what he wants or what Stiles wants or what Cora wants or what Scott wants. Family or pack? How can he choose which to protect when the two are meant to be the same thing? 

Derek doesn’t answer. She leans over until her head is resting on his shoulder. “I love you, you dope,” she says.

“Love you too,” Derek says gruffly.

They sit like that until the kids’ demands for them to come play become too loud to ignore. They pull each other to their feet to join the laughing mess of kids and wolves.

 

When he dreams that night, he’s surprised to find himself in the dark forest on two legs rather than four. Odder still, he’s alone.

“Stiles?” he calls. His breath hovers in front of him.

Something rustles behind him. He turns around, but nothing's there. Unsettled, he starts to weave through the trees.

As he walks, he doesn’t hear anything—no wind, no footsteps. He assumes there’s a sky stretched above him, but there aren’t any stars. He feels the space where the moon should be tugging at his heart and pulling him towards its void. 

His wolf growls at him. _You’re getting distracted, pup. You’re a wolf. Act like one._

Idiot. He closes his eyes and breathes deeply, turning in a slow circle. Just there—the faintest whiff of cinnamon. He turns right and follows it through the pines.

Without Stiles and his light, even Derek’s superhuman eyes struggle to distinguish between the trees. He navigates mainly by scent, moving around spots fragrant with pine. 

He knows he’s getting closer as the smell of cinnamon grows. Eventually, he sees pale light flickering through the trees and starts to pick up notes of lavender and cloves amid the cinnamon. The thick scent of fear ties them all together. 

He pushes back a branch to see Stiles standing in a clearing, his back to Derek.

Derek takes a step forward and Stiles spins around, his hand raised and full of violet flame. The heat from it reaches Derek and feels pleasantly warm in the chill air.

When Stiles doesn’t move, Derek says, “Stiles? Can you see me?”

Stiles lifts his light higher. It deepens the dark circles under his eyes, making them look bruised. “Derek?” he says. “Are you real?”

“Yeah,” Derek says, and takes a step forward. Stiles takes one back, so Derek stops.

“Kira can shape shift,” Stiles says. “Did you know that? So can her mom. So can the thing her mom’s hunting.”

“You know what it is?”

“No. Yes. Maybe. I think I hear it sometimes. I hear everything in here.”

“Like what, Stiles?”

“Like you sleeping. I hear the ocean through your window. I hear Alan screaming. I hear Morrell talking to witches and I hear Kira’s mom talking to gods and I hear Cora laughing and I hear Lydia studying. I hear people I don’t know planning something. Something bad. Something coming.”

Stiles’ gaze has gone unfocused, his voice assuming the detached, hushed tone Derek hears when Stiles calls him in the middle of the night. “Stiles,” Derek says, and Stiles’ eyes refocus on his face. “You’re scared.” He swallows, makes himself say what he doesn’t say often enough out loud. “I want to help you. Let me help you.” 

This time Stiles doesn’t move when Derek takes a step towards him, so Derek walks closer, until the only thing between him and Stiles is the flame in Stiles’ outstretched hand. 

Derek reaches towards Stiles’ face. Stiles doesn’t move back this time, and Derek cups his cheek with his hand. Stiles closes his eyes.

“Do you want me to come home?” Derek asks. 

“Yes,” Stiles says. The word sounds like it’s being dragged out of him, but he repeats it anyway. “Yes, yes, yes.” When Stiles opens his eyes, they’re glowing—like a wolf’s, but purple.

“Help me,” Stiles says, and something spills from his eye. Derek freezes, thinking it will be that thick black ink. But it’s just a tear. Derek wipes it away with his thumb.

“I’ll come back,” Derek says. “I’ll fly back tomorrow if you want me to.”

Stiles reaches up with his empty hand and wraps it around Derek’s wrist, links his fingers over the ridges of his scar. “Hurry, Der,” he says. And Derek wakes up with the salt of Stiles’ tears on his hands.

His brain is foggy with sleep when he reaches for the light. He calls Stiles, but he doesn’t answer, so he texts, _call me when you get this. getting a ticket right now._

He gets up and sits at the desk, opens his laptop and books the next flight back. The earliest one is tomorrow afternoon.

When his phone buzzes, he grabs for it. It’s a text back from Stiles. _what are you talking about?? everythings fine, please dont come back._

 _What?_ he thinks, setting the phone down. And then, _What the hell am I doing?_

Jesus. He’s overreacting. This was different from his usual dreams, so maybe it’s just that—a dream, simple wish fulfillment, Stiles asking him to come home like Derek’s presence will make a difference. If he cancels immediately, the airline will still refund him the full price.

When he reaches for the phone, his wrist hits the table and he hisses in pain. He flips his arm over to look at the underside and sees that for the first time in weeks, his scar is covered with a fresh burn.

The pain brings him back to himself. And, with it--finally--clarity. 

Part of the reason he doesn’t go back is because he’s scared. When he sees Stiles face to face after a month and a half, maybe the thing that Derek thinks exists between them, if there’s anything there at all, will vanish, and Derek will know it only ever existed in is own head. 

Part of the reason is that he doesn’t want to leave Cora, even though she’s with her pack, and part of it is that he doesn’t want to admit that she wants him there but doesn’t _need_ him there the way he needed Laura. 

The other part—the main part, the feeling that sweeps over him every time he thinks about going home to make sure Stiles is okay, the whispers telling him to stay away—isn’t coming from him at all. It’s coming from somewhere else. Someone else. The emotion isn’t his at all.

 

Luisa’s string of swear words is so impressive that Derek feels like he should cover Benjamin’s ears. “Now that I know what I’m looking for, I can see it, clearly as daylight,” she says. “It hid itself because the spell is attached to him, not you, and because I didn’t know you well enough to scent it.”

“What is it?” Derek asks.

“When’s the last time you talked to your friend?"

“Last night.” 

“Benjamin, move, my love,” Luisa says, reaching down to where Benjamin’s holding on to Derek’s leg, his grip is like an octopus. Finally, Cora reaches down and picks him up to get him out of the way. 

“Derek, hold still,” Luisa says. She reaches out her hand for a spot just in front of Derek’s chest and clutches at something he can’t see, curls her fingers around it, and rips it free. He hears the sound of paper tearing, but he has the strangest sensation that the sound is only in his head. 

All at once, his chest goes tight.

“Oh my god,” he says, bending over to relieve some of the pain. “Oh my god, something is seriously wrong, _Stiles,_ I can’t believe I—“

“Breathe, Der,” Cora says. As she leans towards him, Benjamin stretches out his small hand and pats Derek on the shoulder. When Benjamin taps him again, Derek breathes deeply and reaches out for him. The kid nestles into his shoulder, clenching a fistful of Derek’s shirt. 

“This is how you really feel about going home,” Luisa says, her mouth set in a grim line. “This is what the spell has been suppressing. You know something bad is happening at home and you want to be there.”

“What kind of spell is it?” he asks.

“It’s attached to him, but every time you talk to him, a bit of it attaches to you. Think of it as a film or a caul that covers you but so light you can’t tell it’s there.” She turns to Cora. “There’s some on you, too. Not as much, but still there.” 

Cora holds still as Luisa performs the same motion she did to Derek, and then she blanches. “Oh my god,” she says. “Holy shit, I can’t believe you’re still here after he almost died and we still haven’t figured out what the fuck is wrong with him. How has no one noticed anything?” 

“How do we make it stop?” Derek asks. 

“You don’t,” Luisa says. “It’s blood magic—the spell-caster wound it in with some of your friend’s blood, and now he or she is the only one who can remove it.”

“If it worked that well on us and we’re an entire continent away…” Cora says. 

“It has to be exponentially worse for everyone at home,” Derek finishes.

“Who would do this?” Cora says. Her gaze is steely, but Derek can hear her horror.

“It has to be the same person who tried to kill him."

“There’s another option,” Luisa says. “Someone’s trying to make him invisible. This spell shields him from his friends, so it might shield him from his enemies, too. In effect, it could make him unfindable. You have witches in your pack, yes?”

Cora says, “Lydia? She's a necromancer, but she would never—“ 

Derek’s gaze meets Cora’s, and he can tell they have the same thought at the same time. “Deaton,” he says. “Or his sister. She’s not in the pack, but she’s a witch, and she’s missing too.”

“C’mon,” Cora says. “I’m taking you to the airport, like, right fucking now. You have to call Scott.”

“How am I not going to forget this as soon as I’m there?” Derek says. He hopes his face doesn’t show how sick he feels. This entire time—something’s been wrong _the entire time,_ and he’s known it, and he’s ignored it. His wolf’s silent shame blend with his own and eats at him like acid.

“I can give you a charm,” Luisa says. “Rosemary and ginseng. Good for memory. But to be safe, you shouldn’t talk to him again until you’re home.”

“Not at all? Sometimes has to warn him. I have to warn him.”

“I don’t know if you _can_ warn him,” she says. “As soon as talk to him, the spell reattaches to you. You won’t quite forget, but the warning will fall to the back of your mind. It's won't seem urgent anymore.”

“Text the pack,” Cora says. “They’ll forget about it when they talk to him, but at least they’ll be aware of it.”

Derek says, “It wasn’t always this bad. Remember a few weeks ago? I felt like I should go home, and I only didn’t because…” He swallows. “Because Stiles asked me not to.”

“And because I did,” adds Cora.

“And because I wanted to,” Derek says. He doesn’t look away from her until she meets his gaze. He raises his eyebrows until she smiles back at him faintly.

Luisa says, “That was the day after the attack, correct? The spell had probably started to take effect, but I think it’s gotten stronger with time.”

“Does that means he’s gotten worse? And so the spell is working harder to fool everyone?” Cora asks.

“He’s definitely gotten worse,” Derek says. “He doesn’t sleep. He’s cold all the time. He’s terrified of himself. And I think he keeps forgetting things, like he’s not fully present during the day.“

“Didn’t he stop playing lacrosse?” Cora says.

Benjamin squirms in his arms, and Derek realizes he’s holding him too tightly. He relaxes his grip. “That should have clued everyone in,” he says. “Scott, for sure. Lydia and Allison. His dad and Melissa too.”

He’s not sure what expression he’s making, but it prompts Luisa to say, “A spell this powerful came from a powerful source. And trust me, Derek—there isn’t a way to resist something this strong unless you already know it’s there. It’s sneaky and subtle.” 

His face doesn’t change, and the anger and shame and guilt gnawing at his gut don’t either. “Brother,” Luisa says, “Look at me.” Her face is kind. “This isn’t your fault.”

“I have to get back,” Derek says. 

“Immediately,” Luisa agrees. “Mijo, come on, your uncle needs to pack.” 

Benjamin hugs him a little tighter around the neck, but when Luisa reaches for him, he lets her take him. 

“Text everyone, and then I’ll drive you,” Cora says. 

“Not before you say goodbye,” Luisa says, coming over to kiss him on both cheeks. “You’re welcome back here any time. You’re our brother, and you’re a part of this family.”

“Thank you,” he says back, awkwardly. The words aren’t enough for everything they’ve done for him—him and Cora both. But there’s nothing else to say.

 

Teresa sends him off with a bag of oranges and several sandwiches she threw together while Derek shoved everything into his bags in 15 minutes. Everyone gathers in the kitchen to give him a quick farewell. Benjamin, finally realizing what’s happening, is inconsolable by anyone but Gabriel, and Bianca clings to him fiercely. Eventually, though, they all let him go.

Cora speeds on her way to the airport, but he doesn’t stop her. When they reach the terminal, she parks the car to help him unload his bags. “Text me, okay?” she says, pulling out the last piece of luggage. “And Skype. Benjamin will never forgive you if you don’t Skype.”

“I will. I’ll see you again soon. I promise.”

“I know,” she says. She leans over to hug him one last time. “You were always the only one who was good at making promising and then keeping them. You and Dad.”

He doesn’t answer. He just bends down to kiss her on the forehead before he picks up his bag.

“Derek?” Cora calls. “Be safe, okay?”

He raises a hand to acknowledge her, and then he keeps walking. She already said it. He doesn’t make promises he doesn’t know he can keep.

Once he’s settled on the plane, he goes through the math again to reassure himself he got it right in spite of the frantic pace of the last few hours. The flight leaves at 3 p.m. Argentina time, which means 11 a.m. in Beacon Hills. It’s an 18-hour flight, miraculously without layovers. Barring unexpected delays, he’ll land at San Francisco International 9 a.m. local time. 

He pulls out his phone to text the pack—all of them except Stiles—one last time. _Finally on the plane,_ he says. _Remember, something’s wrong—don’t let yourselves forget. Cora will text you every hour to remind you. Stay safe._

Scott texts him back almost immediately. _K dude. fly safe see u soon._

He wants to text Stiles something too, but Luisa warned him that even looking at a text from Stiles will stir the spell. He shuts off his phone to shut off the temptation. 

_18 hours,_ he thinks. _18 hours, and then we’ll be home._

It isn’t until the plane’s already in the air that he realizes Stiles answered the question of who was being tortured. _I hear Alan screaming through the trees,_ he’d said. Alan’s been captured, tortured. _They have him. Soon, he’ll break._

And Derek hadn’t told anyone before he left.

His heart rate rises, and his wolf growls at the back of his mind. _There’s nothing to do about it now. Settle, pup. Sleep. We’ll get there soon._

He leans back into his seat and closes his eyes. _Soon._

They almost make it in time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as always, thanks for reading! you are all shooting stars.
> 
> next up: Stiles can't believe he's going to die in his Iron Man pajamas.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is where things finally, finally take a turn for the worse and get VERY DARK AND CREEPY. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. I am so sorry. CWs/TWs at the end because they are spoilery, but like, basically, death and blood.

Stiles can’t believe he’s going to die in his Iron Man pajamas.

They’d come in the middle of the night, and although he’d screamed his head off, the sounds were muffled. One of the people who grabbed him bashed Stiles’ head against the dresser, and he’d been dazed enough that they dragged him out the window without too much trouble. They’d shoved him into a car and knocked him out. 

When he wakes up, he’s in a cave, lying with his hands painfully zip-tied beneath him. He arches his back, trying to take the weight off his cramping arms, but a heavy boot pushes him back down. Stiles yelps as his wrist twists. 

He blinks to get accustomed to the dim light. Maybe a dozen people stand around the mossy cave, several of them holding flashlights. He recognizes a handful of people—a few cops from the station, his math teacher, some dude he thinks was a lifeguard at the local pool this summer. The others are strangers, except for the person standing right in front of him. Morrell. 

When he moves, she looks down and catches his eye.

Stiles clears his dry throat. “Flashlights?” he says. “Really? I’d always thought evil witches who kidnap people and drag them into caves would invest in sconces, torches, I don’t know, anything with some kind of medieval-torture aesthetic.”

“Let him up,” Morrell says to whoever had shoved Stiles down. The man takes his boot off Stiles’ chest, and Stiles wriggles to his side, then uses his shoulder and elbow to shift up onto his knees without bumping his wrist.

Apart from the man standing next to him and Morrell in front of him, everyone else is evenly spread out in the small cave. It sounds and looks to him like they’re etching something into the stone walls. Symbols or runes or pictures, maybe.

“Nice place you’ve got here,” Stiles says. “I’ll give you this, apart from the flashlights, you’ve got the perfect ritual-murder-sacrifice vibe going on. Fewer trees here than the last ritual sacrifice I participated in, and slightly less torture-y than wherever you’re keeping your brother.”

Morrell smiles at him with the same aloof smile she’s always had. “You finally figured it out?”

“Uh, yeah, duh, I figured it out forever ago. I’ve heard him screaming the last few nights, I just can’t ever remember it after I wake up. And I can’t say it out loud. Hey. Alan Deaton.” He tests the words out in his mouth. “Alan Deaton. Alan Deaton. You’re torturing Alan Deaton. Your brother. Seriously?”

“I’m sure you’re wondering why you can talk about it now when you couldn’t before.”

“Not really,” he says, but only because he doesn’t feel like agreeing with her. “Actually, I’m wondering why I’m not cold. I’ve been so fucking _cold_ for like a month and a half and—” 

“We broke the spell my brother put on you. Ours was strong enough that he couldn’t completely stop it, just freeze it in place around you and keep it from fulfilling its purpose.”

“Its purpose of killing me?” 

She smiles again. 

“That was you?” he asks, even though the answer is obvious. “And since we’re all here at this cozy little gathering, I assume you're going to try to kill me again.” He looks up at her. “You are. Aren’t you.”

It’s not a question. 

“With one key difference,” Morrell says. “My brother isn’t here to save you.”

“He wasn’t there to save me last time either, unless he was wearing a fucking invisibility cloak.“

“Trust me. Where he is now, and in the condition he’s in, he can't help you.”

“I wish you wouldn’t,” he says. “Kill me, I mean."

“You’ve already died once, haven’t you?” says Morrell. “Nearly twice? This won’t be much worse. I can at least promise you that.”

“Oh sweet, that’s great news, because the last two months have been super awesome. That murder-cold-death-spell was super quick and easy, thanks for that. Great comparison, I’m looking forward to this so much more now, this should be—”

“It would have been over much sooner if my brother hadn’t interfered. Our spell should have killed you instantly.”

“Okay then, thanks, former school counselor who I actually genuinely liked and respected at some point,” Stiles says. “Why are you doing this? Trying to kill me already, dragging me out of bed in the middle of the night, definitely pissing off an entire pack that, by the way, is led by the first true alpha in a century? Kidnapping the sheriff’s son? Great ideas, you guys are a bunch of fucking geniuses, but there’s no fucking way I’m worth all this trouble.”

“You know, you were always one of my least favorite students to talk to. You talk too much,” she says, and he opens his mouth to say something sarcastic like _oh, I’m so sorry, is the adrenaline- and terror-fueled way I’m rambling right now getting on your nerves? that sounds so hard for you, and thanks so much for taking the time to insult me right before you murder me, you evil fucking—_

But before he can, she reaches out and touches him in the middle of the forehead.

His body floods with that sensation he’d last felt two months ago when he woke up hovering above his bed—his veins rushing with fire, skin rippling with power. It pierces him with the sharp, bitter burn of ice on bare skin. 

He gasps with the pain of it and doesn’t notice she’s bent down to his level until she grabs his chin, forcing him to focus on her.

“Your eyes are glowing,” she says, searching his face. “Do you know what that means?”

His teeth are chattering, but not with cold—with biting back the searing feeling that scores every breath. “I’m not a f-f-fucking werewolf, if that’s w-what you’re saying. M-m-might as well let me go.” 

“No. It means you’re a Spark.”

“N-n-no fucking shit,” he spits. 

“Not a spark, lower case,” she says. “A Spark. Capital S.” 

“S-s-same fucking word, asshole.”

“Actually, that capital letter makes all the difference in the world.” She releases his chin and stands back up. The flame screaming through him starts to ebb. He tries to focus on stilling the tremors running up and down his body, but now his brain is jumping everywhere at once, fixating on everything and nothing—the black band on Maren’s third finger, the harsh noise of metal against rock echoing through the cave, the nerve in his leg that won’t stop jumping, the pulse throbbing in his wrist.

Maren continues, “Those dreams you keep having, the way you reach through them to hurt people? That power is more dangerous than you know.”

“How do you know about that?”

“Alan told me,” she says. “Not without pressure.”

“But he told me it was nothing,” Stiles says. Fear makes his voice hoarse. “I mean, yeah, I’ve been dreaming and other weird shit’s been happening, but I’m not powerful like Scott. _He_ came back to life as a true alpha, and you think I came back more powerful and threatening than that?"

“I couldn’t care less about werewolf politics or the true alpha. You're the one who interests us.” 

“You’re not making any sense,” Stiles says. “None of this makes any sense, this is all a mistake, you’re going to kill me for nothing.“

“Trust me, Stiles. Everyone in this room knows exactly what they’re doing. We’ve been doing it for decades.”

He would have figured it out earlier if his brain hadn’t been hopping from one mental image to the next, trying frantically to keep him out of the surreal horror show around him. “Decades?” he says, as his brain shows him Scott’s hair, Melissa’s smile, the sun playing on the harbor waves the last time he and Lydia drove up to San Francisco, Derek’s goddamned fucking eyebrows, the last bag of natural, butter-free popcorn he split with his dad. “Oh shit. Shit. You’re the ones who killed all those sparks when Derek was like six. But Alan and Talia killed you. They killed whoever was doing it, Derek said—“

“The Hale pack got most of us in the area,” she says. “They didn’t get all of us. And our numbers have grown since then.”

Flashlights flit across the walls, illuminating Morrell’s face in patches. Maren Morrell, Deaton’s sister, the person who helped and supported them and taught their fucking _French class_ is somehow telling him she’s killed before and she’s about to add him to her list of dead. “Jesus. Jesus. You killed kids, you killed a fucking toddler, why would you—“

“We all make sacrifices for the greater good.”

His voice rises with hysteria. “Thanks for that, Gellert Grindelwald, but I’m pretty sure that doesn’t mean literally sacrificing other people. Maybe try sacrificing yourselves instead and—”

“You think I haven’t made my own sacrifices?” she says, her voice suddenly sharp. “You think I enjoyed torturing my brother? Murdering children who weren’t old enough to know what their power could do? You think I do this on a whim, because I take pleasure in it?”

“If you don’t, then let me go,” he says, his voice finally breaking. “I don’t understand any of this, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Just let me go. Don’t do this.” 

“It’s for the greater good, Stiles,” she repeats. The look she gives him is sad, tinged with bitterness, but he can’t process it. The edges of the world blur. His heart beats so fast he thinks it might explode and save them the trouble of killing him themselves. 

“It’s time,” Morrell says. As one, the others in the cave stop carving whatever the hell they're writing on the walls. They set down their tools and move, smooth and wraith-like, to form a close circle around him. The creepily in-sync movements would frighten him if it were possible for anything to kick his terror up a notch. One of the deputies from his father’s office catches Stiles’ eye and Stiles briefly considers pleading, but the woman looks away.

“We tried to do this the easy way,” Maren says. “Alan ruined that plan. We can’t kill you quickly and painlessly, the way we would have before, because of him. Remember, he’s to blame for what follows, Stiles, not us. I promise it will be over as quickly as we can make it.”

She kneels down in front of him, and the man standing behind Stiles leans over to hand something to her—a slim silver knife. 

Stiles tenses— _fuck fuck fuck fuck_ —but Maren draws the knife across her own palm. Someone else in the circle kneels beside her and places a small stone basin on the ground. Maren pulls her fingers back, forcing her palm to weep as much blood as possible into the bowl. Then she hands the knife to the person in the circle directly behind her.

Each person comes forward in turn, kneels, draws the blade across their palm, and adds to the blood in the bowl while Stiles thinks numbly, _I can’t believe they’re doing this in jeans. Jeans? Honestly? Who the fucking hell wears jeans to a ritual sacrifice? Seems like they could afford to invest in some robes, add to the ambience a little bit, they look like such fucking idiots, why didn’t they bother to make it oh god oh god oh god oh god—_

The last person in the circle adds her blood. She hands the bowl to Maren, who sets it down and dips two of her fingers into basin. She draws them out sticky with blood and starts to paint across Stiles’ face.

He closes his eyes, his breath now coming in short gasps. He feels her draw three spirals—one on his forehead and one on each cheek—and then she scrawls a slash through each one. At one point, she wipes something away from his eye; he supposes he’s crying without knowing it.

When she’s done, the others fan out silently, each stepping back to the edge of the cave where the symbols were carved. When Maren reaches out to touch him on the forehead, he flinches back, but her cold finger finds him and sets each of his nerve endings on fire. He’d scream if he could draw the breath to do it. 

“I name you Fire,” she says. 

“Fire,” the other witches chorus, and they touch their hands to the cave walls. The symbols beneath their palms flare simultaneously. At the same time, a spasm of pain rocks Stiles forward. Morrell pushes him back so he’s balanced on his knees instead of hunched over, grimacing. She dips her hand back in the basin and draws a line to connect the spirals on his face. She drags the blood across his lips, bitter and copper, and he fights not to gag.

“I bind you,” she says, and the witches repeat the words in whisper that grows and grows until the small, dark cave is filled with a sound like wind through trees. 

Maren reaches again for the silver knife. She says something to him, but he can’t make it out over the rushing whispers and his heart pounding in his ears. It might be “I’m sorry,” or it might be nothing at all.

She raises the knife to his throat. 

Time slows just the way it did before his last car crash, the moment he knew he was about to hit a deer and there was nothing he could do to stop it from happening and his thought was _oh shit, time really does slow down when everything’s about to get really fucked up, I’m about to get really fucked up, I fucked everything up, I—_

For the briefest segment of a second, he sees the folds of a lavender dress out of the corner of his eye, his mother’s favorite. He doesn't know if he's imagining the sound of her moving through the air.

Everything is still, save for Stiles’ ragged final breath.

But before Maren has time to carve Stiles’ throat, someone speaks.

“This _has_ been a delight,” the voice says, and something steps out of the darkness. 

Stiles is startled into looking up even though it makes the knife scrape across his throat. But what he sees doesn’t make any sense, can’t possibly be real, because he’s looking at himself. 

His face is hollower, his eyes sunken and ringed with dark circles. It’s also more pointed, his cheekbones more sculpted. Apart from that, it’s like looking at a mirror image— _the_ mirror image, he thinks, the one haunting him across each reflected surface for the last few months. _Huh. Your neurons really do just start flaring insanely right before you die,_ he thinks. _Lydia is going to think this is so interesting._

“Oh, my dear,” says the odd thing wearing his face. Its voice is sharp around the edges. “The human brain has many idiosyncrasies, but unfortunately for you, this isn’t one of them.” 

“What in—“ Maren has time to say, before the thing with Stiles’ face strides forward and snaps her neck.

She crumples at an angle, her limp arm sprawled across Stiles’ knee. The knife spills from her lifeless hand. Stiles can’t move, can’t think, can only stare at her hair curling in the dust. Then the shock holding him in place releases him, and he scrambles frantically away from Morrell, out of the reach of her dead hand. 

“So kind of you all to find my mage, bring him to me, and remove the spell that kept me from him,” says the thing, the not-Stiles, looking around the room with its dark, hollow eyes. “But I’m afraid I can’t allow you to strip him of his power. Not when that’s what I need him for. Stay,“ the thing snaps, and the handful of people who were starting to move towards it freeze, trapped in place. Stiles feels the power radiating from the creature's body holding everyone captive but him.

“Now, Stiles,” says the thing. “It’s my turn.”

He can’t help it; he throws up, the sensation of Morrell’s fingers brushing his knee as she fell itching up and down his entire body. The thing keeps walking towards him, the smile on its face unwavering. Stiles tries to push himself back, but his bare feet don’t find any purchase against the dirt and the monster grabs him by the arm. 

“Stop it,” Stiles says, as the thing, the not-him, rolls up Stiles’ right sleeve. “Stop it,” he says louder, terror rising in a wave as its thumbs the bare skin of his arm.

Without releasing its hold on Stiles, the creature picks up the knife in the dust.

 _Oh god oh god oh god oh god_ is a repeating whine in his head, drowning out everything but the thing’s grin as it cuts into his arm. The blade feels icy hot at first, and then it deepens to a piercing burn. He hears himself screaming and he can’t, he can’t, his brain is on fire with the pain of it, he’ll die before the thing finishes whatever it’s doing, he can’t stand this, his every thought is going up in smoke, and then—

A cool hand cups his cheek. He opens his eyes involuntarily, flinches back from the depthless eyes a few inches from his own. In a flash, the pain’s gone, replaced solely by the feeling of the hand on his face. The palm is sticky and warm with blood.

“Now, mage,” the not-Stiles whispers. “Let me in.”

When the creature breathes out, its words brush against Stiles’ lips like a kiss. The thing pulls back, but the fiery imprint of its hand remains on Stiles’ face. 

For a moment, everything is quiet. Then Stiles feels himself shaking and can’t stop. The red-hot burn of the hand against his chin starts to spread, pain that moves from his cheek to his eyes, from his eyes to his tongue, from his tongue to his throat, and then his whole body is on fire, even worse than before. His world is shattering, exploding with heat and he's convulsing on the cold, hard dirt, screaming his heart out as his sinews unwind and his muscles tear apart and—

It stops.

He blinks.

He sits up.

He’s scratched and bruised and doesn’t feel it. His hands move through the zip tie as easily as if it were water or air as he lifts up one hand and stares at it. Makes a fist. Uncurls the fingers one by one. Everyone in the room is holding their collective breath.

“No,” Stiles says, or tries to say. But some other force inside him is pulling him to his feet, raising his arm, and, with one movement, crushing the windpipe of a robed figure fifteen feet away from him.

 _Stop,_ Stiles tries to say, _stop stop stop._ But the word is only in his head, and the other Stiles, the not-Stiles in his brain and in his body coolly—no, gleefully; he can feel its joy radiating through his bones—and methodically kills everyone in the room.

And then Stiles is the only one left.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay, like, I'm so sorry. if you want to jump ship at this point because this story got wack, I cannot blame you. just. all my apologies. I already have a draft of the next chapter and i SWEAR to you I'll have it up AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. 
> 
> CW/TW for this chapter: minor character death(s), lots of blood and people cutting other people with knives, thinking quite a bit about death.
> 
> S O R R Y and i truly love you all. <3
> 
> song for this chapter: control, halsey


	10. Chapter 10

Two hours before landing, he’s finally starting to drift into a stupefied doze when he feels the searing jolt of Deaton’s spell on Stiles shattering. 

The man sleeping next to him doesn’t wake up when Derek lurches back against his seat. He curls his hands into fists, fighting the impulse to transform into his more capable form, to shift, fight, run, find, save, protect— 

_Stop stop stop we’re on a goddamn airplane,_ he thinks, but the only thing the wolf understands is the pack, and the wolf knows it can protect them better than Derek can. His nails drive into his skin and his vision turns grey at the edges. He tries to make it understand: _nothing to protect here, only everything to expose; they’ll lock us up where we can’t help Stiles or anyone._

The wolf pants and rages, but colors start to filter back into Derek’s vision. When he opens his hands, they’re filled with blood, but he’s still human.

The next two hours are unbearable. When he finally lands, voicemails filter in slowly. He listens to them while they taxi, but the messages are so panic-filled that they’re hard to decipher. _Derek oh my god Derek Stiles is gone, Deaton’s body dumped at the clinic nearly dead might die, Stiles is fucking gone, no fucking trace and there’s this writing on his walls and know one can figure it out and we don’t know what to do Derek help Derek get here fast please Derek—_

He doesn’t bother going for the carousel. He just heads straight to long-term parking, calling everyone in the pack in turn, but no one answers. Not Melissa, not the sheriff. He’s going to go out of his mind after all, completely fucking lose it as he steps off the fucking shuttle to the parking lot when he suddenly remembers he can call Chris Argent. His isn’t exactly the first voice Derek had wanted to hear, but it’s not like he has a choice. 

Derek’s heart’s in his throat, and it lurches when Chris finally answers. “What’s happening,” Derek says through gritted teeth.

Argent’s voice is terse as always. “In a nutshell? Chaos.”

“Meaning?” Derek flings his carry-on in the trunk, throws himself into the front seat, and shoves the key into the ignition. 

“You felt that spell break, right?”

“Two and a half hours ago.”

“Yeah, well, Allison tells me everyone else in your pack felt it too, and that they think Stiles disappeared at the same time. They went through his room but Scott says there’s not a trace of him anywhere.”

“There has to be a scent or—“

“There’s not. Allison and I went over it as thoroughly as your wolves did and we can’t find anything.”

“The sheriff?”

“Searching with a few deputies. He’s got nothing.”

“Fine. I’ll be there in an hour.”

“From San Francisco?”

“An hour,” Derek repeats firmly. He’s already pealed out of the garage. “Tell me where to go.”

“Allison’ll leave the woods and meet you at the Stilinskis’. All of your wolves are out searching the forest except for Scott. He’s at the hospital with Lydia and Alan.”

“They don’t want me on the search?”

“Scott wants to see if you can figure out what the hell Stiles wrote on the walls. No one else can.” 

“What he wrote on the—“

“It’s hard to explain,” Argent says. “Just get to the house. If Deaton doesn’t make it out of surgery…someone will call you.”

The rest of the drive is a blur of road flying beneath the wheels and anxious thoughts that fill him up and choke his lungs like smoke. _Disappeared dead disappeared dead didn’t get there in time didn’t get there in time I never get there in time I never…_

He presses down on the gas pedal and keeps going.

 

He’d held onto the hope that even though the Argents and the wolves and whatever cops the sheriff trusted enough to help him search for his son without talking couldn’t find Stiles’ trail, they’d overlooked something that he’d spot. As Allison leads him into the room, that hope vanishes. 

There aren’t any scents besides those Stiles left behind: sleep and fear, dried blood on the desk's sharp corner. None of the people who broke into the room left so much as a scrap of scent, a fingerprint, a strand of hair behind, like Stiles was stolen by phantoms. The smell of gas lingers near the curb, but there's no indication of who the people were, where they went, what they wanted, where they took him.

Allison’s wearing her sleek black gloves and has a quiver slung across her back. He’s already counted her two handguns and noted the knives tucked out of sight in her boots and sleeves. It’s killing her just as much as it’s killing him not to be out there searching with the others. Stiles vanished hours ago, and neither the wolves nor the hunter nor the sheriff have turned up any sign of him. Deaton’s still in surgery. If he doesn’t make it or doesn’t have any leads for them....

 _If you won’t shift, stubborn pup, at least focus,_ his wolf snaps, so he does. Allison lingers near the door while Derek moves to the room’s center, absorbing every detail: the blanket tossed over the mirror, the sheets wrenched to the floor, the books stacked neatly on the desk. And, of course, the writing on the wall. 

The numbers stretch in three columns that run from the top of the wall to the very bottom, each row in the column made of three numbers separated by commas. The handwriting is unmistakably Stiles’, though it’s both tighter and more jagged than his writing usually is and trails off into nearly indecipherable scribbling at the end of the last column. 

“Lydia thought it might be a message in code,” Allison says. “She couldn’t stay long enough to figure it out.” 

If it’s not a message, it’s gibberish, a broken mind turning in on itself. The thought ghosts through the room, brushes against his cheek, and makes him shiver.

“They’re not coordinates?” Derek asks.

“Lydia says they can’t be.” 

His gaze flicks around the room, picking up more details. Stiles’ phone knocked to the floor, face down, battery dead. The mountain of blankets in the corner. He flips open the small spiral notebook on the bedside table. The pages are dated from mid-September and filled with notes in Stiles’ handwriting on his daily schedule. Not just his course schedule—his work schedule, reminders about making dinner for his dad or hanging with the pack or calling Derek. Some of the lines— _Sept 30, 2pm, get eggs at grocery store for dad, frittata_ —have check marks next to them. Most of them, like _Oct 13, 8:20 am, Lydia says pop math quiz_ —have question marks scribbled beside them or angry lines drawn through them.

Derek turns from the notebook back to the north wall. While he scans it, Allison pulls out one arrow to test its edge, then another, a nervous habit. He doesn’t glare at her to stop until he tastes the faintest hint of blood from her thumb in the air. The perfectly symmetrical stack of books on the desk keeps attracting his gaze. They’re so…neat, especially in contrast to the crooked posters on the wall and the piles of laundry dropped randomly on the floor like stepping stones in a game of lava. 

The neatness would make sense if they were in Derek’s room. But they’re not. They’re in Stiles’. 

“Could be a book cipher,” he says. 

“What’s a book cipher?”

“It’s an easy code. You use groups of three numbers to point the reader to a word. The first number indicates the page number of a book, the second number indicates a line on that page, and the third number indicates a word in the line. The writer and the recipient use the same book as their reference.”

When Derek was little and Cora was a baby and Laura was off in her preteen world being much too cool for him, Derek and his next-oldest brother Will wrote secret messages back and forth for fun. They’d disguise their ciphers as bookmarks, writing long columns of numbers on strips of paper easily tucked between pages. 

He has no memory of ever telling Stiles—or anyone, not even Laura—about his and Will’s messages. And, of course, their notes had burned up in the fire.

Allison looks at him, calculating. “Okay,” she says. “So if you're right, we just have to figure out which book he used to write the code?”

Derek looks closer at the stack of books on the desk. It doesn’t include all of his books. Some are still in the box beneath the desk. But all the books included in the stack are perfectly aligned, the thickest, sturdiest books on the bottom and slimmest paperbacks at the top. But— 

A book near the middle of the stack isn’t his.Carefully, without moving the others, he pulls it out. 

“What is it?” Allison asks.

“The Essential Pablo Neruda,” Derek says. For a second he’s back in the small room in Argentina, stars through the window and Spanish poetry on his tongue, Stiles’ deepening breath filling the space between them. 

_Focus,_ the wolf growls again, so he says, “Read me the first three numbers.”

“21, 6, 2,” she says. He opens the book and carefully starts to thumb through it. “Why write us a message in code in the first place?” Allison asks.

Second word on the sixth line of the twenty-first page. “’Has.’”

“Has what?”

“That’s the word. Grab a pen, write it down, and read me the next one.”

She pulls open the top drawer of Stiles’ desk and rummages around until she finds a pen. Then she swipes the notebook from the bedside table, flips to a blank page, and asks, “Why not just tell us the message?”

“Allison. The numbers.”

“3, 4, 6. Derek—”

He flips there. Counts. “Your,” he says. “Write it down.” Then he says, “He was forgetting things. He left Scott these weird voicemails that he didn’t remember leaving. But then Scott would forget they were weird as soon as he talked to Stiles.” _That goddamn spell._ “Maybe writing something down like this…maybe he thought if he put it down in a code that forced him to think about each word, he’d remember it.” Or that the pack would. Maybe he thought the numbers would stick in their heads the way his voice didn’t. 

“Why do you know about the voicemails if neither of them remembered?” she asks.

“Scott remembered long enough to tell me about them one time,” he says. “I told him there was something off about them, I talked to both him and Stiles about it, but then I…” 

After a few seconds, Allison sits on the bed next to him. He hadn’t realized he sat down. “Then you forgot,” she says. “Me too.” Quietly, she puts her head on his shoulder. 

“59,” she finally says. “7, 6.”

He sits back up, flips to page 59 and counts. “Sister,” he says, and his mouth suddenly goes dry.

“What is it?” Allison say.

“Next number,” he responds. “Write that word down.” 

They keep going until they string an entire sentence together, then another. 

“Okay,” Allison says, and reads out loud from her notebook: “’Has your sister already left? I told her she should wait for you.’ That doesn’t mean anything.” She sounds bleak. “There’s no code, is there.” 

“Actually, it means something to me,” he says. “That’s the last thing my mom said to me.”

“What? The last thing—“ 

“She ever said to me,” he repeats. “The last time I saw her before she died.” 

His mom had been talking about Laura. They’d raised their eyebrows at each other in fond exasperation after she’d said it; Laura was always racing to be a step ahead of the rest of them. He’d wanted to walk across the kitchen to hug her, say goodbye for the school day, temporarily bridge the wall of hurt and silence that had grown between them over the last two weeks. 

But Laura was already ages ahead, and he had to catch up, so he’d rolled his eyes his mom. His mom had grinned back. And he’d left.

“How could Stiles know…” Allison says.

“He couldn’t,” Derek says. 

They look at each other.

“Next number?” Allison asks, and Derek nods. 

 

The setting sun is an orange line outside Stiles’ window when Derek tells Allison, “Read it through from the top again.” 

It had taken them an hour, but they’d eventually figured out that Stiles switched from one book to another about halfway through each column. When the numbers Allison read to Derek started to spit back nonsense—a sentence like _if the so raven kind white with_ —they would backtrack and move to the next book down in the stack until the words seemed comparatively logical again.

There hadn’t been any real news in the last six hours. Deaton was in surgery for ages; Lydia had to bring him back from death twice, force him to stay tethered in the body the doctors were racing to repair. Now he’s in post-op, but neither Melissa nor Lydia know when he’ll wake up. Chris texted them with updates as the wolves and the sheriff combed the area around the clinic, creating a larger and larger perimeter, but they didn’t turn up anything. Allison told them she and Derek had cracked the code and were figuring out the message but that so far there wasn't anything in there that could help. So they'd all carried on their separate searches, getting more desperate by the hour. 

Stiles must be alive— _must,_ he thinks fiercely, or Lydia would know, and she’d tell them. Apart from that, between the entire pack, they have nothing. Nothing but the assumption that Stiles left behind a message that he and Allison slowly, carefully parsed through, but apart from the first sentence, the words are meaningless to both of them. 

When Derek speaks, Allison pulls her head out of her hands and picks up the notebook for the second time. She flips back a page and reaches over to switch on the lamp on the bedside table. Derek lies back on the bed and closes his eyes while she talks. 

_Has your sister already left? I told her she should wait for you._

_Find the secret in the blood._

_How it’s purple and blue around the mountains when the sun sets after snow._

_Split in dreams, together in woods, alone in water, self in fire._

_Take care of yourself._

_Ice cold down there with the fish and the waves but a line and a bell bring them back._

_Who are you? I don’t know you. Leave, get out, someone help._

“That one could be a kind of premonition he wrote right before they came for him,” Allison says when Derek doesn’t open his eyes or say anything. She’d just said that exact same thing five minutes ago, when they’d finished and read the entire thing out loud. It might be true, might not be. It’s not like there’s a way for them to tell. 

Nearly night, and they have nothing. His brain is dead tired, but not numb enough to suppress a ripple of anger—not at himself or at Deaton, but at Stiles. 

Jesus Christ, he can’t believe he’d thought—but they’d _all_ thought, or else he and Allison wouldn’t have stayed here for hours away from the rest of the pack—they might find a message that actually made fucking _sense,_ Stiles-the-one-who-always-figures-it-out figuring it the fuck out so they can drag his ass back where it belongs and Derek can lean close to him and smell and taste and feel and breathe that he’s fine, whole, alive, here, that he didn’t lose Stiles forever like he's lost everyone else.

He considers throwing something at the wall, but everything nearby belongs to Stiles, except for his own phone. He’s about to rip it out of his pocket when it buzzes and Allison’s chimes. Before he can open his phone, she grabs hers, unlocks it, and skims the message.

“Deaton’s waking up,” she says. “Scott says he wants to talk to us.”

Derek’s already standing, grabbing his jacket from the foot of the bed. “The wolves?”

“Dad says they’ll meet us there.” 

“Let’s go,” Derek says. Allison grabs the notebook and follows him down the stairs, flipping off the light. 

He’s about to close the front door behind them when Allison says, “Derek. What if he comes back while we’re gone?”

Derek looks at her and she looks back. He's not coming back. They both know it.

After a moment, he swings the door closed. Together, they walk across the dark lawn to her car.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guys, I am SO INCREDIBLY SORRY this took me so long to post. I promised people I'd have this up about a week ago, and I try so hard not to go more than a week without updating!! I will do everything I can to ensure it doesn't happen again!!!! You have my sincerest apologies for everything. I'm so so sorry.
> 
> Next chapter will be up ASAP!
> 
> Self-indulgent song for this chapter: London Thunder by Foals


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw/tw: very brief, fleeting reference to statutory rape. I'll recap below if you want to skip ahead and see what I mean! It's about a sentence long in the middle.

Derek can’t look away from the vase on the bedside table. He traces the curving lines of the glass over and over and over like he's counting prayer beads. Whoever made the arrangement paired soft, cream-colored dahlias with a few chrysanthemums streaked with yellow and pale green lamb’s ear. The colors are somber and muted but comforting against the suffocating dullness of the hospital room walls. 

_Pay attention,_ says his wolf. Instead of growling or snarling, it presses at him softly, which makes Derek want to give in and finally shift, curl up into a warm ball on the floor where he can yawn and let his thoughts flow from words to images and scents until everything human slips away.

 _Now,_ his wolf says, this time nipping at his tired mind hard enough that he flinches. _A few more hours and then we can sleep._

He tries to drag his gaze away from the vase, back to Deaton’s hospital bed. Scott clutches his hand, siphoning pain in black lines up his arms. The sheriff leans against one wall, his chin resting on his chest and one hand on his forehead. Melissa stands next to him, their shoulders touching. The rest of them are positioned around the dark room, everyone tense and tired. Deaton's face is turned to the wall.

“I realized what he was as soon as he started talking that day in the clinic,” Deaton says. Derek’s glad he can’t see his chest or legs, covered in electric burns as they are. “A Spark. One of the last, if not _the_ last.”

“We all know he’s a—a spark,” the sheriff says. The word is rough in his mouth like he’s still not used to it. “So what changed? Why'd they show up all of a sudden?”

“The same word, but a capital S,” Deaton says. “Not every spark, lower-case, has the potential to become a Spark, upper-case, but some do. Ages ago, they were known as elemental mages. Stiles was one of them.”

 _Is one of them,_ Derek thinks. _Is. Is. Is. Don’t you dare say was, you son of a bitch, not when it’s your fault we weren’t there to save him._

“Alan, why haven’t any of us heard about them before?” Boyd says. Out of all of them, he’s the only one whose voice stays strong and steady when he talks to Deaton. The rest are too tired or angry to speak with the calm they should around a man whose heart stopped twice on the operating table. 

“Cults like my sister’s have done a fantastic job of wiping them out through the centuries,” says Deaton. “The ability is passed on genetically. If you kill enough Sparks, you kill the potential parents who would have created more.”

Boyd asks, “What do you mean by the potential to become a Spark?” 

Deaton coughs before answering. When he raises one hand up to his mouth to wipe away the spit, Derek notices each fingertip is bandaged. “Witches draw on power outside themselves to create magic," he says. “Sparks draw on power from inside themselves. Some sparks’ inner strength or and power is stronger than others’. Depending on the person, a traumatic event can…spark an even greater power, for lack of a better word.”

“But how does that make him different than before?” the sheriff asks. Melissa leans a little closer to him and he leans closer in return. “Why would this cult try to kill him now and not years ago?”

“They thought their job was done,” Deaton says. “They killed the last Spark before we got to them—that's what they thought, that's what Talia’s pack and I thought. But then Stiles died.”

“Which triggered the change,” Boyd says, and Deaton nods.

“If he were different, his change might not have been powerful enough to attract their attention. Their numbers are so diminished, their power waning, and I thought…” He trails off. Then, he turns his head, opens his eyes, looks at Derek directly. “Derek, you know what he can do. Show them your arm.”

He’s tired enough that it takes a second for the words to filter through his brain. He drags himself to his feet, pulls back his long-sleeved shirt, and raises his arm.

The burn from two days ago—two? three? feels like a lifetime—hasn’t faded into a scar. It’s raised and rippled, an angry red in the vague shape of a handprint. Allison hisses in sympathy.

“Stiles told me he did that when he came to the clinic,” Deaton says. “Every Spark ever born has their own unique talents, and one of Stiles’ is dream-walking.”

“That’s not dream-walking,” Lydia says. “You can only dream-walk as a spirit, just like with astral projecting. You can’t touch anyone when you dream-walk, which is why I thought he was just overreacting when he told us he thought he’d hurt someone in a dream.“

“That was a fair assumption on your part,” Deaton says. “Regular people can’t do what Stiles did to Derek. In fact, I doubt there’s anyone else on earth at this moment who has the power to step through dreams and hurt the dreamer badly enough to leave a permanent scar. Especially not a creature as powerful as a werewolf.”

“Stiles couldn’t have done that,” the sheriff says. “Stiles wouldn't hurt anyone like that.”

“He didn’t do it on purpose,” Deaton says, as if that will help. 

Derek clears his throat. “Deaton's right. It took him forever to get up the courage to ask me if anything had happened to me.”

“God, Derek, why didn’t you tell anyone?” Lydia says angrily.

“He asked me not to.” 

“Jesus _Christ,_ Derek, that doesn’t—“ 

“Fire, Lydia,” Scott says. “He stepped through his dreams and burned _Derek._ Why would he want to tell us that?”

The sheriff asks, “That's why they kidnapped him? Because he’s powerful now? So where’d they take him?”

It takes Deaton a few seconds to answer. “I don’t know,” he says. “And I’m sorry.”

“Oh really? You’re sorry?” Lydia says. She's suddenly, ominously quiet. “You have much more to be sorry about than that, Alan.” 

Allison moves like she wants to pull Lydia back, but Lydia shakes her off. “You used blood magic, didn’t you? That’s why none of us could figure out what was wrong with him and why he couldn’t tell us himself.” She’s shaking now, either because she’s exhausted from bringing Deaton back twice or because she’s furious. Or both.

“It's also why he’s alive,” Deaton says.

“Kept him alive for what? So he could spend a month being miserable and terrified and in pain and not knowing what was wrong with him and not able to tell anyone about it—why? So he could die weeks later when they finally found him?”

Derek flinches; Lydia notices the movement out of the corner of her eye and pauses for long enough that Scott can ask, “What’s blood magic?” 

“Dark magic that controls someone from in the inside out rather than the outside in,” Lydia says. “It means he used the magic in Stiles’ blood to repel the death spell, but Deaton also changed how Stiles looked and sounded so none of us could help him.”

“Why keep us in the dark, Alan?” Boyd asks. 

“And why leave?” Isaac mutters. 

“They knew someone in your pack was the Spark,” Deaton says, closing his eyes. "But they’ve lost most of the techniques and knowledge they once had that helped them identify Sparks. They couldn’t risk harming the wrong member of the pack—you're the true alpha, Scott, the first in a century. They were scared of you. 

“Instead of attacking all of you, they created a killing spell that would target the Spark, no matter who it was. Lydia, believe me, blood magic was the only thing powerful enough. Because of it, I could use Stiles' own power to counteract the spell and mask him well enough that they couldn’t tell who the spell affected. When their spell didn’t work, they followed me to find out what I knew.”

“You used blood magic to seal that spell to Stiles so he couldn’t escape from it, couldn’t dream-walk, couldn't conjure that whatever-fire he was using, couldn’t be who he was and couldn't tell any of us about it, so excuse me if I don't sound entirely grateful and understanding,” Lydia snaps. "And that doesn’t answer Boyd’s question.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Scott says. 

“To hide him from them, I had to hide him from you,” Deaton says. "The more people who knew what he was, the greater the risk. I’m sorry.”

“Where were you running to anyway?” Erica asks. Her voice isn’t quite as hard as Lydia’s, but it's close.

“One group fought to protect the Sparks through the millennia,” Deaton says. “Right now, they’re in Japan. That’s where I was going. Obviously, I didn’t make it.”

“Dammit, Alan, we could’ve—“

“Trust me, Erica. You couldn’t have helped. I know I shouldn’t have done it,” he says, opening his eyes and looking at Lydia. “Blood magic is cruel and painful. But trust me when I say I had no—“ 

“There’s always a choice, Alan,” Lydia says. “Always. Except for when people like you take it away from us.”

“Lydia,” Scott says, “he says he tried and you know he saved Stiles. Give it a rest?"

“You don’t know what it’s like to have someone invade your mind and force you to believe what they want,” Lydia says. “To make you see only what they want you to see and nothing else and make you to act the way they want you to, not the way _you_ want to. It’s horrible, Scott, and he did it without our consent, without _Stiles’_ consent. It’s the worst form of magic there is.”

It’s true, and it’s true with or without magic. Derek knows how people like Kate and Peter claw their way into your head and use your nails to tear down the whole world. Deaton was doing what he thought was best. And he saved Stiles’ life. But Derek can feel the marks of Deaton’s hands digging through his mind to uproot his most important thoughts. 

Melissa finally speaks, blunt as always. “Do you know why they haven’t killed him yet?” 

“No. And I don’t know where he is. I’m sorry."

His voice trails off. They watch him for a moment in silence, and then Melissa says, “I think it’s time for you lot to go. He’s told you everything he can, and he needs to sleep.”

“Alan, please, is there anything else—“ the sheriff starts.

“I’m sorry,” Deaton repeats, and that’s that.

Scott releases Deaton's hand, but only grudgingly. All of them but Melissa trickle out of the room. When Derek goes to close the door behind him, the vase on the bedside table catches his eye again. He traces the leaves of the lambs’ ear and the ragged edges of the chrysanthemums as a last prayer, to who or what he doesn’t know. To whoever arranged the flowers. To the hospital walls. To Stiles. _stay alive._

Erica’s the only one who notices in time. Right after the door closes, Erica throws up her hand so it’s between Lydia’s fist and the wall. Lydia hits hard enough that Derek hears the crunch of something breaking. 

When Erica takes her hand away, her tendons and fingers are already re-knitting themselves. Lydia stares at her hand like it’s a foreign object. 

“Lydia,” Allison says, “let me look at it.” When Lydia continues to stare at her fist, Allison repeats her name. “Lyd. Look at me, okay?”

Lydia does. When their eyes meet, something passes between the two of them and Lydia’s face crumples. Suddenly she’s crying into Allison’s shirt while Allison runs her fingers through her hair. Scott grabs gently for Lydia’s hand, an addict always ready to fill his veins with poison.

Isaac says, “Fuck, Lydia, I know you're mad, we’re _all_ mad, but it’s not his fault he told them—“ 

“You think I blame him for talking about Stiles under torture?” Lydia asks. Her words are muffled by Allison’s shoulder. “I’d never blame him for that, and neither should anyone else.” She looks up and glares at him, her eyes red. “Almost all of us have been tortured, and it’s idiotic anyway, torture is a completely ineffective way to glean information. More often than not, it elicits false information, since the person being tortured is desperate to make the pain stop.”

“Wait,” Derek says, his brain trying to catch up with whatever made his wolf tense.

“If they don’t have the information their interrogators want, they’re likely to either say what their torturers want to hear or make up information plausible enough to temporarily stop the pain. It just so happened that Deaton did have the information they wanted; there’s no shame in giving it up. What he _should_ feel ashamed of is—”

Derek interrupts, “Lydia, wait. Have you said any of that before? That stuff about torture?”

“Have I ever said the exact same words I’m saying now in the exact same order? No, Derek, I have not,” she says with customary superiority.

“Stiles said that to me,” he says. “He said that paragraph exactly the way you did. He almost said it in your voice.”

“When?” Erica asks, frowning.

“Over the phone, a few nights ago.” And he explains (knowing he should have done it already, knowing but he's been selfish not to) that they’ve been sharing dreams, that he’d follow Stiles through the woods and Stiles would call him scared and sad and saying odd things that made no sense and that he wouldn’t remember when he woke up fully.

“He says he heard things through the trees,” Derek says. “Things I couldn’t hear when I was with him. Things like Deaton screaming. Maybe he heard you talking.”

“But Deaton was screaming in the present,” says Lydia, “or at the same time Stiles was having the dream, presumably. If he said the same words I just did, he must have been…”

“Hearing the future,” Boyd finishes. 

“Derek,” the sheriff says softly. “Did he hurt you in those dreams?” 

Derek’s relieved that he can shake his head. He doesn’t know if he can stand to add another line to the sheriff’s worn face tonight. “It only happened a few times, and each time…” He swallows. “Honestly, it worse for him than it was for me.” 

“So he heard the future, and we know he heard the past at least once,” Allison says. “He wrote down…” She glances at him.

“He wrote down the last words my mother ever said to me,” Derek says for her. 

“You broke the whole number code thing?” Scott says. “What does it say?”

“It’s not helpful,” Derek says. God, he’s so tired. 

“Here, listen,” Allison says. Lydia pushes away from her, wiping her eyes, as Allison fishes the small notebook from her back pocket. “Maybe someone else will recognize one of them.” 

When she finishes, Boyd says, “The one about the mountains. That sounds like…like something my little sister said to me before she died. I asked her what her favorite color was, and that’s what she said.” Erica reaches for his hand; he curls his around hers, grips tightly enough that his knuckles strain.

“I don’t know what any of those mean,” the sheriff says. “I don’t know what he wants us to do with that. I don’t know...“

His voice breaks, and Melissa says, “Everyone here needs to sleep. Time for bed, all of you.”

“Mom, he’s still out there, we can’t just—“

“Sweetheart, you’re dead on your feet, and you’re all running on empty. Sleep for at least a few hours. There’s nothing you can do tonight.”

“There has to be—“

“We’ve looked through that entire forest,” Chris says abruptly. “Looked through the school, Deaton’s witch sister’s house, Deaton’s house, John’s house…there’s no trail. No way to find him. We should regroup, wait til morning and sunlight.”

When Scott talks again, he sounds about five years old. “It’s so cold out there, Mom,” he says, “and he’s been so cold this whole time and we didn't help him.”

Melissa lets go of the sheriff’s hand and walks over to Scott, draws him to her. He’s so much taller than her that her motion should look comical, but Derek’s never felt less like laughing in his life. 

_Has your sister already left? I told her she should wait for you._

_Hush,_ his wolf tells him, and he quiets the keen fighting to escape his throat.

“You can only help him if you can pay attention to every detail,” Melissa tells Scott. "None of you will find him like this."

“Fine,” Scott says against her shoulder. She hugs him tighter. When he finally pulls away, he says to the sheriff, “But we’re sleeping at your house, okay, John?”

The sheriff nods.

“I’ll stay here for a bit,” Melissa says, and tugs at Scott’s neck until he bends back down. She plants a kiss on his forehead. “Lydia, you should—“

“Come back in a few hours,” Lydia says. “I know. I want to verify he makes it through the night.”

“I was going to say get that hand looked at, but that works too,” Melissa says. 

“Nothing’s broken. Thanks, by the way. I don't know much about fighting, but I know never to punch with your fingers curled around your thumb.” 

“My clever girl,” Allison says, and puts an arm around Lydia’s shoulder to pull her close again. 

When they get to the house, Lydia and Allison curl up on one couch, planning to wake up in three hours to head back to the hospital, and Erica and Boyd take the other. The sheriff heads to his own room, though Derek doubts he’ll sleep. Scott and Isaac tell him they’ll take the spare room. He doesn't know if it's intentional on their part or not, but they leave Derek with Stiles’ room.

He hasn’t closed his eyes in three days, but he doesn’t want to sleep. If he curls up in Stiles’ bed, he closes his eyes to the possibility of waking up to another warm form beneath the sheets. 

The books are scattered now instead of neatly stacked; he and Allison tossed them aside after finishing one sentence and moving onto the next. His copy of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is halfway across the room, bent like a tent at the spine, but he doesn’t care. A spot of green near the window catches his eye: his two plants, the spider plant as vibrant and green as when he left it, the cactus growing a new nub. Stiles didn't forget to water them or tilt them towards the sun as the seasons changed. 

Slowly, he pulls off his clothes and allows the shift to overtake him. He jumps up on the bed, circles a few times, and lies down. 

Near morning, something brushes against his consciousness. It’s feather-soft and leaves a pale stream of purple in the air behind it. His wolf turns over in its sleep and whines. 

When the feeling of another mind against his own disappears, it leaves behind the ghost of emotions that aren’t his own—a deadly calm, a controlled terror, a sense of relief that has something to do with himself that he doesn’t understand, that turns to mist as soon as he wakes up. 

 

He’s the first one awake in the morning. The house is silent except for the heartbeats he can count from the bed—Boyd and Erica still on the couch, Scott and Isaac in their room. The sheriff is gone, maybe back at the hospital or up at the clinic or prowling the highway.

Derek shifts back into his human self so he can check his phone. There’s a text from Allison saying Deaton’s still breathing, still fine, still sleeping as of an hour ago when she sent the text. Apart from that, nothing.

He sits up and pulls his knees to his chest. He rests his head on top of them, inhaling the scent on the sheets. The smell of cinnamon is fainter than it was last night now that Derek’s slept in the bed. Maybe he's imagining it, but he thinks he can still smell a faint bitterness like the coffee scent that clings to Stiles’ skin. 

When he walks downstairs, he hears Boyd start to stir from the living room. Derek heads into the kitchen, but before he can open the cupboard to pull out the coffee to make for everyone else, someone knocks on the door.

The tips of Derek’s fingers go numb. He hears the clatter of feet hitting the floor upstairs and a door on the second story being wrenched open. Erica and Boyd scramble off the couch, but Derek reaches the door first.

A boy he doesn’t recognize is standing on the porch with a look of sheer panic on his sheet-white face. He has black hair and icy blue eyes, and he looks like he spent last night outdoors. He doesn’t have any shoes on, and his shirt and jeans are rumpled and dirty. 

The boy opens his mouth to speak. Before he can, Derek says, “Kira, right? Come in,” and he swings the door open wider. 

“How did you—“ Erica says behind him.

Kira’s eyes look a thousand years old, and she smells like air does before a lightning strike. He can feel something in the air around her, something with a faint yellow light and a sizzling aura that sways back and forth behind her, swishing like a tail. She couldn’t be more obviously a kitsune if she tried.

“Kira’s here? What—“ Scott says, making it to the door at last. 

“Scott,” the boy says, stepping through the door. The terror doesn’t disappear from his face as he shifts into what Derek assumes is her more customary human form. Instead, the fear intensifies, as do the dark, tired circles around her eyes. “I have to show you something. All of you. Right now.” 

“Why do you smell like…” Scott begins, and then Derek notices it too. Just under that crackle of electricity: blood. Specifically, Stiles’ blood. 

“I have to show you,” she says. “Follow me. Now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> K, got that one up faster! Next chapter: Stiles' pov. Again, so so so sorry for the delay. Also, I promise this won't be a Lost Season 2-type situation where questions keep getting raised and not answered...mysteries will be solved! I promise! Stay tuned! I
> 
> Many thanks to all of you lovely, much too kind humans. You're great <3.
> 
> Recap for the cw/tw mentioned above: Lydia's upset when she figures out that Deaton used a specific type of magic that controlled Stiles and the way everyone else responded to him. In essence, he changed their typical thought patterns and their actions, and she's super pissed about it. Scott tries to tell her to calm down, but she tells Scott that he doesn't know what it's like to have someone root around in your brain and control you (the implication being that she's talking about Peter), and Derek, thinking about Kate, silently agrees with her. That's all!


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: this chapter features a lot of blood and knives. also vague references to statutory rape and suicidal ideation, similar to past references in this fic. also hospitals and hospice care and death and torture. i hate hospitals.

First, the crushing darkness.

Next, the searing pain in his hands. He opens them reflexively, hears something fall to the ground, and raises his hands to eye level. A red ribbon cuts across his palms. Its crimson ends are silk on his wrists. They drip and drip and drip, but ribbons don’t drip, and these can’t be his hands, anyway. They’re shaking and shaking and shaking. They won’t stop.

“Stand up, mage,” comes a voice, but he hasn’t moved, he’s standing still, staring at his ruined hands. Then he glances down and is mildly surprised to see that no, he’s wrong, he’s kneeling on hard dirt. 

“Stand, I said,” and someone yanks him to his feet. Stiles drops his hands and meets its—his own—gaze. 

Stiles studies the face in front of him in a detached way, like he's observing a stranger. The only difference between the two of them is the other thing’s eyes, which aren’t brown and warm but colorless and dark. They glint like a deer’s or a dog’s in headlights at night.

His other self is wearing blood-spattered jeans, not blood-spattered pajamas, but its hands are clean and uncut. It’s also wearing a black shirt and would probably look less ridiculous than Stiles currently does in his superhero pajamas, except it’s also wearing a black cloak with wide sleeves and a hem that ruffles the ground.

“I look like a fucking asshole in those clothes,” Stiles says. He sounds far away, thick and slow. “A goddamn cloak? Really?”

The other self grins at him, feral. It steps forward and casually backhands him so hard his head slams into something solid behind him. His vision blurs and he rocks forward onto his knees. When he brings his hand to the back of his head, it comes away with fresh blood that smears the ribbon on his palm into a page, a whole sheet of deep red. 

He waits before speaking to see if he’s going to throw up again. The thing seems content to watch him. Finally, Stiles says, “Now that I’ve seen the broody cloak option, I actually think the witches made the right choice with going jeans-only, you know?” 

The world spins. He wants to know what he hit his head on, so he stretches his hand behind him and leans back until he feels the scratchy, flaking bark of a tree. He looks down and sees a vague brown patch surrounded by a vague green patch. 

_I’m in the forest,_ he thinks. _The real forest? Or the forest in my head where I hear things and hide from things and walk with fire and Derek says he follows me and I can’t see him is he here is he here is he—_

“What did you do to my hands?” Stiles says.

Instead of answering, the thing kneels in front of him. It grasps his chin with one hand, like it did in the cave where he killed all those _oh god oh god oh god._ His instinct is to skitter out of its reach, but the pain in his head traps him in place. 

With its other hand, the thing reaches into the air in front of Stiles’ face, pinches its index finger and thumb together, and draws a dark line in the air like it’s slitting open the daylight to let in the night. The black line solidifies and falls to the ground. 

“Pick it up,” the thing says. After a moment, Stiles reaches forward, moving his head as little as possible. The object is slim and short with edges so sharp they bite into his hands. He hisses in pain but doesn’t dare drop it.

“You broke one of these for me just now. Do you not remember?”

 _Of course I remember, that’s why I fucking asked._ “Nope.”

“You hold the tail of a fox stolen and fashioned into an object of my own design. When you break one of these for me”—it closes its hand around Stiles’, forcing the blade deeper into his skin—“I access your power, and a bit of the fox’s, to enhance my own. Just now, you broke a tail I took from a fox who was skilled in the art of air, of traveling silently. It moved us from that filthy cave to another part of the forest. This one…” It tightens it grip on his hand before releasing it. “Well. You’ll see.”

“Ooookay. So we’re in the forest?” he says, picking out the one image from the monologue that he understands. He's still shaking, thinks he might be in shock. If Lydia were here, he could ask. 

“ _I_ am, and your _body_ is, near the tree, the consciousness you call the Nematon. Dark, lovely, twisted thing. It called me to you. _You,_ though. You now exist solely in your head, where I’ve placed you.”

 _Now would be a good time to learn how to shut up at appropriate times. Ready, set, shut up at appropriate times, Stiles. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up._ “Technically, asshole, if I’m inside my own head, I’m in the forest with you too.” 

“That woman, your teacher, she thought you were insufferable. Did you know that?” It studies its nails, which, unlike Stiles’, are free of dirt. Then it lifts its hand and trails it down his cheek, hard enough to flake off some of the dried blood Marin painted on him—when was it? Seconds ago? Minutes? A year? A day? _Before I killed them before I killed them before I_ —“I begin to see her point.” 

“Yeah, I kinda figured she hated me when she tried to kill me.” 

“She didn’t try to kill you because she hated you. She tried to kill you because she feared you.”

“Makes perfect sense, I’m terrifying,” Stiles says. “Especially compared to Scott and Derek and…” But his chest starts to seize. _Don't think of them. Shut up._

“She had every reason to be terrified of you. Look around.”

Stiles doesn’t; the world is still spinning and the space behind his eyes aches. “Look at the forest? Wow, cool, a forest, never seen one of those before.”

“You know what I’m speaking of, just as you know what I am. You’ve heard it all in these woods you crafted.”

His head throbs. “I didn’t craft them, I just dream about them, and yeah, I know what you are, you're that goddamn thing that wouldn’t stop chasing me through these woods I _dream_ about, not create or whatever, every night, and Kira's mom is hunting you.”

“You dream them into being, mage. You called them to you and built them up and use them to step into conversations and minds you’ve no right to.” 

_I’m being lectured by myself, wearing a goddamn clock like a fucking gothic villain, in a forest I dreamed alive inside of me. Everything is fine._ "So what if I did?"

“Dream-walker, forest-shaper, you can tell me what my enemy has plotted. You can speak it now your emissary’s spell is broken. Foul thing, sealed you inside your body, locked your tongue and memories. But nothing now keeps you from telling me what you know. So speak it, mage. Unspool your thoughts.”

He doesn’t want to help it. Obviously. His Bond-villain self dressed in black. _Stop shaking._ But it doesn’t matter. He tries to swallow the words but his mouth opens of its own accord. 

“Noshiko Yukimura is your enemy. The…goddess?” The word doesn’t feel quite right, but he can’t find one that better captures the truth. “That…thing she serves. It sent her here.”

“And what does the goddess say when the kitsune appeals to her?”

“Nothing,” Stiles says. "Not anymore." 

“And how has the kitsune prepared herself against me?”

Stiles’ face feels flushed. He wonders if his eyes are glowing bright like a wolf’s, like Morrell said they did when they were in the cave. Not that it matters; _she’s dead she’s dead I killed her she’s dead._ He lips feel numb but he can’t stop them moving. 

“She knows you defeated all the other foxes that the…goddess-thing, or whatever, sent to destroy you. She knows you took their souls and…and ate them.” _And I remember now I remember that’s what I heard, that night Derek saw me crying and he couldn’t hear anything and I couldn’t see him is he here is he_ “Even though Noshiko is the oldest and most cunning of the kitsune, she’s afraid of you, and the goddess-thing is too. Before she stopped talking, she gave Noshiko some guards, or something. Something called Oni.” He tries to stop the next words, but they force their way between his lips. “Neither of them thinks they’ll be enough to stop you.”

“They are correct,” says the other Stiles. “They won’t be enough. Last time the goddess defeated me by a nail’s margin. Pitiful creature. She couldn’t kill me, only scatter me. It took centuries for me to piece myself together, and by then, cults had eradicated most of your kind. Imagine my surprise, my delight when your tree, your town awakened, and I found you here, newly powerful and with no one to protect you.”

“That’s not true,” Stiles says, the words forced out of him just like the others, ringing with truth. “Derek walked with me through the woods every night and you could never find me when he did.” 

“Yes, that wolf,” the creature says, frowning. “I’ll have to do something about him. And the others. In fact, I believe you’ll help me kill them, Stiles. All of them.” It pauses, thinking. "Yes. First, the kitsune, with your friends' help. Next, your pack. Especially that insufferable black wolf."

“Why?” he says. Something wet cuts through the dried blood on his cheeks. 

“Because I want to,” the creature says. “And because you can.”

“I can’t,” Stiles whispers. “I really, really can’t.”

The thing smiles at him, inhuman and utterly terrifying. “You don't believe me? Then let me show you. The tie to earth that let you spin a forest from your dreams is the second reason those fools feared you. The first reason is this.” It removes the black blade from Stiles’ hand and sets it aside. Then it grabs Stiles’ hand and presses into his palm right along the bloody split.

Pins and needles turn to fire that runs along his nerves, tracing the same pathway as when Morrell touched his forehead in the cave. Instead of growing naturally as the tide, the sensation moves slowly, painfully, thick as oil through his veins. It aches, and his hand twists as it fills with fire that isn't a soft, comforting lavender but a deep purple, dark as a bruise.

“Most of all, they feared this. The power given you by fire to main and kill.”

Tears drip from his cheeks like the ribbon of blood on his palms. Like the broken faucet in Scott’s bathroom that kept Stiles up at night when he slept over as a kid. Like water from their bodies when Stiles finally pulled Derek from the pool after hours and hours, muscles spasming and cramping and their breath coming in tight, synchronized gasps. Like October rain in the storm he watched with Lydia last week, lightning forking. 

The creature releases his hand. It picks up the black blade and curls Stiles’ fingers around it again. He whimpers as it slices into his palms.

“Now you know what you can do. It’s time for me to know more of you too.” It leers, its eyes huge and black and only an inch away from his own. “Break this for me, mage.”

He doesn’t want to, doesn’t want to, can't not. When he does it sounds like lightning.

The trees bleed to mist, and he’s thrown into a ragged, howling void. The thing comes with him, one hand clutching his own. A wild, bloody grin splits its face. When the noise stops, they’re together in the silent darkness. 

It drops his hand and steps away. “The mind of a nogitsune is a place few humans have ever been. See how honored you are, mage.”

“Jesus Christ,” Stiles says, the pressure in his chest reaching its boiling point. “Every sentence you say sounds even more dickish than the last thing you said. What the hell is up with your syntax?”

He thinks it’s going to hit him again, but instead it chuckles. Then, with no warning, it shucks off his body and turns to shadow. Before he has time to gasp or shriek or faint or whatever a normal person is expected to do when something steps out of its skin, Stiles' _body_ , like it's a coat, the shadow molds itself into a form with sharp ears, four legs, pointed teeth.

The kitsune in the bestiary were made of light. This fox is made of darkness. The large, tail-like aura around it isn’t gold and gleaming but black. When it opens its mouth, its sharp teeth glint.

“The kitsune whose tail that was,” it says, its tongue lolling out. Even in the blank, dark void around him, he can see the creature clearly. It’s so much darker than everything else around it. “Do you know what power it had?”

It’s not using Stiles’ voice anymore—this is its own, curved like a scythe and hissing on his skin.

The thing—the nogitsune—tilts its head, like it expects Stiles to answer. “Obviously,” he says, and has to clear his throat, “I do not.”

“Its affinity was with the night, and it had an understanding of dreams and spells and memory. Like you, mage.”

He tries to say something typical and stupid through the pain in his head, like, “wow, fantastic, I’m excited that we’ll come to the same horrible end at your horrible hands.” But the shadow moves towards him, its grin wicked. Stiles takes a step back. It advances and the darkness presses at him, and then the fucking thing _grows,_ loses its solid lines to become a cloud that rushes towards him and swallows him whole and before he has time to think or scream, he’s plunged into— 

_The day before she lapses into a coma, his mom screams at him from her bed in the hospice ward, spit on her drooping, dying face. She shrieks that he’s a stranger and she doesn’t know him and who is he, why is he scaring her, why is he tormenting her? She doesn’t stop until the nurses make him leave the room._

_Derek falls backwards into the pool and for one horrible, heart-stopping moment, Stiles doesn’t see fear on his face but relief._

_Scott is chained up in the other room, screaming so hard he tears his vocal cords. Each time they rip, they lash themselves back together. He tears them, they mend, he screams them apart again in blind rage as his wolf takes control._

_Lydia’s half-dead on the football field and Stiles is the only thing between her and 200 pounds of unhinged, psychopathic werewolf. He can’t tell if she’s breathing. Peter smiles and offers to shred them both to pieces._

_His mother’s breath rattles as she collapses her own lungs, preparing for death. “It’s called a death rattle,” says the nurse who changes the sheets, as if knowing what it’s called will comfort him. Stiles scrapes anxiously at his wrists while the sound fills him up._

_In the cabin, he looks back and forth between Kate and Derek. He recognizes the look in Derek’s eyes and he sees the looks in hers, and he realizes for the first time the full extent of what she did to him. All the air is sucked from the room._

_His breath is already much too fast when he wrenches a pill bottle open with shaking hands and finds it empty. The panic creeping up his chest finally freezes his lungs. His dad’s missing, Scott’s making a bargain with a psychopath, Derek’s sister’s dying, and Stiles is utterly useless. He lets the panic attack run its course and then lies on his bedroom floor, waiting for something to happen._

_He wakes up from the worst dream he’s had in a lifetime of bad dreams, the one where he grabbed onto Derek’s wrist and couldn’t let go and listened to Derek scream and scream as Matt moved closer to Stiles with a knife and Derek’s skin burned._

He dies in the ice bath, he watches monster after monster beat Scott bloody while he stands there helpless, he curls up on the cement floor and screams while Gerard Argent kicks him so hard he breaks his ribs, he watches electricity shake Boyd and Erica until they go limp, he sees Cora dying and hears Derek yelling after him as he runs towards danger down a dark hallway. The memories claw at him and choke him until he can’t breathe, and then the thing lets him go.

He tumbles from a high place and hits the grass of his forest hard. 

“Beautiful,” comes a voice beside him. “We’re going to do beautiful things together, you and I.”

Stiles manages to take a breath. “Fuck you,” he says. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck—“

The thing kicks him with a studied look on its face, right in the ribs like fucking Gerard.

“Fuck you,” Stiles says again, but he’s finally too tired to do anything else but curl up slump until his forehead touches the ground. God, it hurts. Everything hurts. 

“What was even the point of that?” he murmurs into the grass. “Why?” 

“It pleases me to rip you apart from the inside out.”

And Stiles starts to laugh.

The thing frowns at him and he can tell it’s going to kick him again because he sees it move out of the corner of his eye, but he doesn’t care and doesn’t roll out of the way. He laughs and laughs and laughs and the thing kicks until there’s blood on his teeth and the sky is going black and finally with a swirl of its goddamn cloak of assholery, the thing is gone and Stiles sobs with laughter alone on the cold ground.

 

 

The most he can do is roll onto his back. He can’t measure how long it takes; the concept of time has abandoned him. He stares at the sky, or the place where the sky should be. The world seems to end at the tops of the trees. He imagines he can see stars.

“If you have a concussion, you shouldn’t fall asleep before being evaluated by a medical professional,” comes Lydia’s voice in his head. He pretends he can hear her toss her long hair over her shoulder as she says it. 

“Sorry, Lyds,” he answers out loud. “But how can you expect me to find a decent medical professional at _this_ hour, you know?”

“At least get up and move around and do whatever it is that you want to do. You don’t know when it’s coming back. You don’t know how many chances it will give you to do this.” This voice sounds like Derek’s.

“Bossy, bossy, bossy,” Stiles says, raising a hand to trace lines between pretend stars with all four fingers. Curling them up to extend one threatens to split the cut on his palm. “Would a medical professional even know how to treat a concussion inside a concussion that is possibly inside of another concussion? A concussion of the soul, if you will.”

The voices won’t. They’re silent.

He thinks about his plan, the one he'd pieced together while slowly, painstakingly rolling himself over. Something tells him the voices are also considering the plan; their silence is expectant. "I don’t know if I can do it,” he tells them.

“You won’t know until you try.” Allison.

“Get the fuck over yourself and stand up,” Derek says.

“Fuck you, Derek."

“Fuck _you,_ asshole. Stand up.”

Slowly, he rolls over to one side. The dark world spins, and he pushes himself to his knees.

He pauses there a second. “Okay, but actually, I super don’t think I can even stand up, guys."

“Stiles, are you or are you not inside your own head?” says Lydia. “Are you or are you not a spark? Do you or do you not have the power to bring your own imaginings to life?”

“Oh,” he says.

“Come on, you can do it, man. I know it.” Scott this time.

Stiles wants to run his fingers through his hair but his hands hurt too much. “Fuck all of you, honestly. This fucking hurts, do you even care?”

“Seriously? Try chronic illness, whimp. You're the whiniest human I've ever had the misfortune to meet,” Erica says.

Derek again. “Stiles, get it over with.” 

Stiles closes his eyes. He takes a deep breath through the pain in his chest. “I believe I can stand up,” he says. “I believe I can stand up. I believe I can stand up. I can stand up. I can stand up. I can stand up. I can...”

He pictures himself standing, feels the ground beneath his bare feet, makes it real. And then it is.

He lets out a shaky breath. “Okay. I can stand up. Now what?”

“Now, you walk, Stiles. And then you can learn the order of the alphabet and maybe some basic addition before naptime.”

“Fuck you, Isaac, that question was at least half rhetorical. And I know that you know it was rhetorical because I’m imagining your stupid obnoxious voice in my stupid messed-up head. And I don’t know what that means and I don't have, like, the emotional energy right now to analyze it. So just…shut up.” 

The voices do. 

_I can walk,_ he thinks. _I can take one step forward. I can take a step. I can take a step._

He repeats the words as he walks deeper and deeper into the forest. A few times, when he’s about to fall over from sheer exhaustion, a tree branch is there to support him when he reaches out. He wonders if the trees are moving to help him or if he’s hallucinating that they're moving like he’s hallucinating the voices and possibly everything else that's happened since Morrell kidnapped him. Who knows. 

Once he thinks, _I can take like five more goddamn steps, Derek, and if I can’t find you then your dumb ass is going to have to save itself for once,_ but the thought sends a shock like electricity through him. _I can walk._ He counts five steps, then five more. 

He’s so focused on walking that he nearly trips over Derek’s sleeping wolf in the darkness.

“Jesus _shit,_ ” he says, catching himself just in time. Derek doesn’t move; the wolf breathes softly through its nose. 

The dream forest has been eerily silent the entire time he’s walked. He doesn’t necessarily miss the creepy voices that lived here throughout the last few months, but the lack of them feels unnatural. He’d figured he wouldn’t find Derek awake, if he found him at all—if his presence kept the nogitsune away, it makes sense the nogitsune wouldn’t let Derek all the way in. The Golden Rule and all.

“Fuck,” he says anyway. And then, “fuck it.” He doesn’t quite keel over, but it’s a near thing. Instead, he tries to sink gracefully to the ground next to the wolf. It’s more of a flop, but it gets him there.

For a moment, Stiles holds his hand above the wolf, tentative. His hands are shaking again. He moves them down to run through the soft black fur. They pass straight through the wolf to the ground.

“Oof,” he says, overbalancing. One palm hits the ground and makes him wince; he snatches the other back in time.

“Interesting, interesting,” he says as he waits for the sharp pain to recede. “So you’re not just a voice, and you're here but not here. Where does that put everyone else I'm looking for? Same situation? What do you think, Der?”

Derek doesn’t answer. 

Stiles can’t bring himself to get to his feet now that he’s down, so he crawls, using his elbow to jostle the surrounding bushes. Eventually, he uncovers Scott, Allison, Boyd, and everyone else in the pack. All of them sleeping, all completely un-touchable. 

Stiles makes his way back to Derek. “Hey, Der?" He pauses, considering the sleeping wolf. "I'm gonna try something to protect you guys, and I’m practicing on you first to see if it works. You're an idiot, so you probably think I'm testing it on you because I care about you the least, right? Well, fuck you, Derek Hale, you know fuck-all. It’s because you're... _more_ than everyone else. Does that make sense?”

Probably not. Stiles will have to tell him face to face as soon as he gets back, but the thought that he might get back at all makes him start to wheeze with hysterical laughter he's too tired to control, so he holds out his hand. One way or another, he’s going to find out if any part his meager plan will work.

He pictures the wild sage in his mother’s garden. He smells it, pungent and bitter, and runs an imaginary thumb down its silk. He envisions the leaves in his hand, and then he calls his flame. His cut hands twinge, but the flame springs to life easily enough, pale and perfect. 

The sage, real or imagined, burns to ash. He pushes himself in a circle around Derek’s sleeping body, scattering it. Then he whispers the word that seals the ward. A sifting noise rushes through his head.

“Alright, well, I have no fucking idea if that worked or not,” Stiles says. “And I’m afraid to try. Hey, Derek. What would you tell me if you were awake?” He answers himself in a gruff voice. “Well, Stiles, I think I'd first raise my stupid eyebrows at you, and then when you'd keep looking at me like a fucking idiot, I'd say something condescending, like, why bother dragging yourself all the way out here to find us if you were too scared to try anything anyway?” He switches back to his own voice. “And I’d be like, fuck off, asshole, but secretly I’d be like, goddammit, he’s fucking right, and so I’d try something like this when you weren’t looking.”

Stiles steels himself for failure and closes his eyes and mentally pushes against the barrier that may or may not exist. And—he brushes against it. It doesn’t feel warm or as strong as it should, but it’s there. 

“Well how do you like that, motherfucker,” he says. “Sweet. There was like a 95% chance that I wasn’t even going to find you and a 95% chance that wouldn’t work, but check it, it totally did. Bam.”

The great thing about imaginary sage in an imagined forest is that the plant never runs out. He shoves himself from sleeping body to sleeping body, surrounding each one with sage and burning it to set the ward. 

He ends with Scott. As sage turning to ash fills the air, he lets himself slump and rest his head on the earth.

Once forces himself back onto his bruised elbows, helets out a shaky breath. “Okay, so that's done. Gold star for me, or whatever, but you know you can’t stay here, right? So…go away, or whatever. That fucking thing will fuck you up and probably also fuck me up if it finds you in here. So. Shoo.”

Scott doesn’t shoo. 

“Goddammit,” Stiles says. “God fucking dammit. Get out of here, Scott. Get out of my fucking head.” He doesn't know when he started crying again, and maybe it's more from tiredness than anything else, maybe it's because he’s been awake since the witches took him and his teacher held a knife to his throat and threatened to slit it, since a demon zipped itself into his body and used it to murder a dozen people, since he relived every single one of his worst memories, recalled perfectly the way they felt and sounded at the exact moment they happened.

“You have to go,” he says, his teeth chattering. "Go. Get out. Be safe somewhere else. All of you get the _fuck out of my head._ ” Suddenly his voice is shrill. Suddenly he’s screaming. Suddenly he’s yelling and the trees are shivering above him and he’s stretching out his hands and his face is so hot and flushed he might be on fire and he screams the agony of everything that’s happened in the last 24 hours and everything that’s going to happen and the knowledge that he doesn't know what else to do but this to stop it.

And Scott shifts in his sleep. And Scott’s gone. And so are the rest of them. 

All of them but Derek.

Stiles groans, and then he coughs. His voice is absolutely wrecked. “You fucking stubborn asshole,” he rasps. And then he drags himself back across the clearing.

He lies down on the ground, nose to nose with the wolf. If he opened his eyes, they’d be staring straight at each other. Those stupid ocean-blue eyes. Cerulean. Eyes so blue they shouldn’t be fucking legal. 

“You have to go, Der,” he whispers, and the wolf whines without waking up. “Please? I can’t yell at you. Just do what I say for once in your goddamn life.”

The sleeping wolf sighs. “Don't sass me,” Stiles says. “You're going. Okay?”

He's believed too many things into being tonight. He's been wrung out like a cloth, and every part of him aches and aches and he can't see an end to it. Still, he holds his hand over the wolf’s fur and closes his eyes and holds his breath. “Be real,” he whispers. “Be real, be real, be real, just for one second.” 

And for one second, Derek is. Stiles lays his hand down and grasps at the warm fur like an anchor, feels the rhythm of Derek’s breath. He feels what Derek feels—miserable, angry, confused, lost. 

“Calm down, Der,” Stiles murmurs against his fur. “I’m fine. See? Everything is so beautifully, marvelously under control. I’m going to be fine.” He takes a shuddering breath and scratches behind the wolf’s ears. “Now get out of here.”

Derek whines and growls in his sleep, and then he vanishes like the rest of them.

Stiles curls up next to the tree in the same spot the wolf occupied. It smells of fallen leaves and grass and dirt but also of peaches, and the musky scent of black tea. 

Finally, he falls asleep.

He’s a dreamer locked inside a dream he brought to life, so he doesn’t dream while he sleeps. Instead, he repeats the same thoughts in his consciousness over and over and over again.

He won’t let it know what he’s done.

He won’t let it kill his friends.

He doesn’t know how yet. But he’s going to save everyone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> holy shit, that took me so long. i am endlessly sorry. thanks for letting me send this weird child of mine out into the world where it can torture you as it tortures me daily. i truly apologize for the WEIRDNESS of this mess. if it's too weird, I TOTALLY UNDERSTAND.
> 
> next chapter: derek's pov. the pack finds the cave.


	13. Chapter 13

Last winter, Derek gave Stiles a warm, slim pair of bottle-green gloves. He knew his perception of hot and cold was skewed, but the kid had to have a circulation problem because his fingers were constantly freezing. 

Gift giving wasn’t exactly his strong point, and it didn’t help that the only reaction he could picture Stiles having to Derek, of all people, giving him a present out of concern was mockery. So he waited until the morning after some fight of the week that left everyone slow and stiff and tired, drove to Stiles’ house, left the gloves on the doorstep with a terse, unsigned note, and drove away.

When they’d all met up in the afternoon, Derek had been gruffer than usual with the betas, crossing his arms over his chest and frowning at their perfectly good suggestions. He’d braced for Stiles to tease him mercilessly about the gift, but when he’d finally shown up, Stiles had been oddly quiet. He’d worn the gloves that night, and many other nights, without saying anything about them.

Derek’s not sure what about the cave Kira’s leading them to brings the gloves to mind. It might be the lingering frost from the cold October night. It could be the witches’ bloody handprints smeared across the cave walls. Or it might be the taste of Stiles’ pain and fear on the air, so thick you could choke on it. 

On their long drive to the cave deep in the preserve, Kira tells them how two nights ago her mom left the house with her katana and a group of half-spirit, half-monstrous creatures called Oni. Kira had waited a few minutes and then quietly trailed the group in fox form through the preserve, up to a cave she never would have found on her own.

She arrived right after her mom and the Oni as the last witch’s body hit the ground. She saw blackness fill up Stiles’ eyes. She heard her mother say in Japanese, “Don’t think your choice of host will deter me, nogitsune,” and she heard the thing in Stiles’ body respond in the same language, “After you spent this much time hunting me? Noshiko, I’m counting on it.” The Stiles-that-wasn’t-Stiles grinned fiercely and vanished before her mother and the Oni could attack. 

Kira turned tail and ran, heading for the city to tell the pack what she saw. The Oni caught up with her first. 

“This is kitsune business,” her mom snarled when the Oni dragged Kira back home. “Inari business. Not wolf business.”

“No, it’s _nogitsune_ business that you dragged them into. It’s his territory and his pack, and you're going to kill his best friend to cover up a mistake the kitsune and Inari made centuries ago. It’s not right and you _have_ to tell him.” 

In response, she says, her mom bound her with a magic so strong she couldn’t move, leave, speak. She escaped that night, but not without paying too high a price. 

“We should hurry,” Kira says when Isaac hesitates at the mouth of the cave. Derek can’t blame him; the scent of death is overpowering. “She could come back any time.” 

Allison and Lydia are still at the hospital with Deaton, so only Erica, Derek, Boyd, and Isaac fan out to search by sight and scent. Kira collapses against the wall, hugging herself around the middle. Scott keeps a hand on her shoulder, but Derek doubts he can alleviate much of her pain: it’s only been a few hours since Kira ripped one of her two tails from her body, transmuting a hundred years of power and knowledge into enough energy to break her mother’s spell. 

Derek moves from body to body and examines the knife cuts on each witch’s palm. The skin along the slits is white and open like a mouth. There’s too much blood on the floor to have come from one person, which would be reassuring if he didn’t know by scent and taste how much of it belonged to Stiles. He follows the scuffmarks from the center of the cave to the edge where Stiles either pushed himself or was dragged. Only Stiles’ blood is pooled on the floor there. 

The entire cave reeks of the beginnings of decay except for one corner that stays dark even in the light from their phones. It doesn’t smell like Stiles or witches or blood or the rancid, evil magic the witches used. Whatever it is fills his mouth with an odd taste. Dirt, maybe, or shadow.

“Neck’s crushed,” Erica says, frowning and nudging the body closest to her with her toe. “And this one’s spine is, like, snapped in half.” Derek feels Scott’s eyes on his burned wrist and wishes he’d grabbed his leather jacket before they left.

Suddenly, Kira stiffens and the pack members’ heads swivel towards the cave entrance as one. Sound and scent tell him that someone—several someones—are approaching the cave, and that none of them are human. 

One smells of ozone and lightning and a harsh spice Derek can’t place. The others smell of silver and steely, inhuman determination. Even though multiple figures are walking towards them, Derek only hears one set of footsteps.

“Shift,” Kira hisses. “If most of you shift, she might be too scared to attack.” 

Scott’s eyes flare with adrenaline and Derek hears his knuckles pop, but Kira reaches up to grab Scott’s wrist. “You should stay human in case she wants to talk instead of fight.” 

“What about you?” Scott asks her.

“She won’t talk to me,” Kira says. “And I can’t shift like this.”

For once, Derek nearly wishes he couldn’t either. Stripping in this place makes him feel ill, but it’s either that or drive home in shreds of cloth, assuming Noshiko lets them out alive. Erica’s already shifted into her honey-colored wolf. Her fierce green eyes meet Derek’s as he steps out of his human body and into his wolf’s.

Noshiko stops at the cave’s threshold. The darkness around her resolves into several silent figures that wear silver masks and dark hoods and carry glinting katana. Their cold, bright eyes remind Derek of lightning bugs. 

“Wolf,” Noshiko says, nodding at Scott. She bares her teeth in a hard smile, but the wolves can smell the fear that shivers down her skin. Her eyes stay fixed on Scott without once flicking over to the wolves or Kira.

“What do you want, Noshiko?” Scott says.

The black and silver figures float with her when she steps forward. “The same thing you do,” she says. 

“No offense, but it kinda seems like we definitely want two opposite things.”

Noshiko spreads her hands in what Derek thinks is meant to be a conciliatory gesture, but at the same time, the Oni tighten their grips on their swords. “We both want the nogitsune gone. We both want to punish it for taking your friend. We both want to protect the weak. We should be allies in this fight.”

“Really?” Scott says. “That’s what you think?” 

“Yes. We should work together now to—“

When Scott interrupts her, his voice shakes with anger Derek’s rarely heard from Scott. “Oh, _now_ you want us to work together? If you’d told us what you were doing here, like, two months ago, we could have helped you find the thing before it found Stiles, but you wouldn’t even _talk_ to us. And now because you were too scared or mad at us or whatever, a member of my pack is—what, possessed? By an evil spirit or some shit like that?—and it’s your fault in like _every way.”_

“Don’t lecture me about shared information, wolf. Not when you were hiding a Spark in your pack.”

“Stop calling me _wolf._ My name is Scott, and this pack is _mine,”_ Scott snarls, and Derek feels something warm spread through his ribcage and down to his paws. He hears Kira’s quick intake of breath and knows she feels it too. 

He continues, “You invaded my territory, put my pack members’ lives in danger, you were a complete fucking asshole to your daughter, and now you think you have the right to kill my best friend and you were gonna do it without even telling me about it?”

She purses her lips, concealing her teeth. For a moment, no one speaks.

“Do you know what this is, wolf?” she says, putting as much contempt as she can into the last word. She gestures to the corner of the cave, at the spiraled pool of Stiles’ blood. “That is a sign that a blood seal has been created.” 

She looks at Scott like she expects a reaction, but Scott’s face stays blank. Derek glances around. No one, Kira included, seems to know what she’s talking about.

When she speaks again, it's with such precise callousness that she sounds cruel. “Do you know what I saw on your friend’s skin that night? The nogitsune carved a sign on his arm that seals the demon permanently inside your friend’s body. There is nothing you can do to help him now save kill him and end his misery. Do you understand me?”

“Mom,” Kira says, but Noshiko ignores her.

“Death is the only mercy now, and you _will_ fight to kill him with me.”

Derek growls low in his throat. He sees Scott shaking and knows Kira’s hand on his wrist is the anchor keeping him tied to humanity. “We’re not helping you.”

“If I leave on these terms, wolf, I consider you and yours my enemies. If you stand in my way, I will cut you down with him.”

“Mom, if you’d just—“

“Fine,” Scott says. “We’re enemies. We get it. Now get out.” 

Noshiko gives Scott a last appraising look before she turns on her heel. The Oni’s swords disappear and the figures waft after her. Her scent and footsteps vanish a few paces outside the cave.

Kira chokes on either a sob or a rush of pain, and the red bleeds from Scott’s eyes. He sinks down next to her. She curls against his shoulder. 

The wolves start to shift back, but no one talks. Noshiko’s gone, but her words still echo through their heads. Derek knows—they all know—that she’s right. 

Stiles _would_ rather be dead. 

“What’s up with that seal thing?” Erica asks Kira.

“I’ve never heard of it,” Kira responds.

Boyd shrugs. “Deaton might know.” 

Everyone silently tugs on pieces of clothing. “Let’s go,” Derek says. “She won’t waste any time. We can’t track him from here and we need to tell Alan about his sister.” Scott winces. 

While the rest leave, Derek scans the cave one last time. The wolf relegates guilt to the back of his head for practicality’s sake. He’ll have time—endless time, maybe the rest of his solitary life—to let it drown him. 

Here, now, it’s more important to witness and sear the memory to his skin, like he did the bones and ash of his family after the fire. Screams leach from the cave walls. Blood splashes in arcs and trickles down the tips of fingers he would suck clean if he could. Bodies twist and drop, and the last live shape in the cave grows dark, contorts, and vanishes. The soul goes out like a spark. 

_Go._ While he follows the others back to the car, the cave’s details blur and blend with the imagined feel of wool gloves across his fingers. 

 

It’s nearly dark when he Skypes Cora from his own kitchen table in the loft. Everything’s dusty, nothing’s out of place, and nothing about it feels like home. His favorite books are strewn across Stiles’ bedroom, the only two splashes of green in his grey home keeping them company. 

“I’m coming down,” Cora says as soon as she answers. “I’ll catch the next flight out. I should have fucking left with you in the first place.”

“No,” Derek says sharply. “Stay where you are. I don’t want you getting involved in this.”

“Fuck you, Derek, that’s some sexist ageist bullshit and you know it. I’m already involved and if you were here and I was there—“

“But you’re not,” Derek says. “I’m here, and I say you’re not coming.”

“But—“

“Jesus, Cora, he’s already killed 12 people. Imagine how he’ll feel about killing strangers who were about to murder him, and now imagine how he’ll feel if he kills you next time.”

“That’s not the—“

“Yes it is. Think of it as me looking out for him instead of you if you want, but you're not coming up here.” 

“That’s still bullshit, you know he’d feel the same way if he did anything to you and you’re already there, so I might as well—“

“Exactly. I’ll be damned if I increase the number of people he cares about who are in Beacon Hills for him to hurt.”

“Fucking fine,” she says. Their mutual angry silence fills up the room. 

“Did you find out anything about those goddamned blood seals?” she asks without looking at him directly.

Derek shakes his head. 

“Deaton really didn’t know anything?”

“I wouldn’t say he was entirely coherent.” A little feverish, a little high on pain meds. Derek hadn’t stuck around long anyway. He’d left the room with Lydia, Allison, and the keys to Deaton’s house before Scott told him his sister was dead. 

“Benjamin’s awake,” Cora says abruptly, “if you want to see him.” When Derek doesn’t answer right away, she says, “Don’t be such a fucking grouch, it’ll make him happy.”

When Cora stands up, he rests his head on the kitchen table next to Deaton’s books. He and Lydia had grabbed anything off the shelves that looked like it could relate to witches, dark creatures, possession, blood used in rituals. 

They’d split the books between them to see how many they could tackle tonight. It was useless, but at least it was an action. Besides tailing Noshiko, who stayed near home for the rest of the day, all they could do was research, prepare, and wait for something to happen. 

When he hears Cora coming back on screen, he looks up blearily.

“See, kiddo, there’s your uncle Derek. He didn’t abandon you completely.”

Benjamin twists forward from his place on Cora’s hip to prod the screen. He furrows his eyebrows when the screen stops his hand from reaching Derek’s face. Then he nudges Cora to set him down and scampers to grab his blocks. He hoists himself back into the chair, points at Derek, and makes sure Derek’s watching before he starts to stack them in orderly rows. 

Cora absently runs her fingers through Benjamin’s hair while he orders the blocks and looks up at Derek periodically to confirm that he’s still watching. 

Their silence runs on until Benjamin starts to droop and Cora says, “Go to bed, Der. Okay? You need it. And tell me the second anything happens.” 

He’ll tell her, but he won’t go to bed. He’s slept more than Lydia has in the last 24 hours and has more still to read. Besides, he feels like a ghost in the sterile, oversized loft. If he creeps into bed he’ll disappear. 

He speed-reads Deaton’s books, skimming through paragraphs without mentally vocalizing the words. He finds one paragraph on kitsune in a large encyclopedia of Asian and African magic, but it doesn’t tell him anything he doesn’t already know. There’s no mention of nogitsune.

Sentences run in and out of his head as he moves between books. A few hours before dawn, he grabs his jacket and slips out of the apartment.

The streets are symmetrical and bare, all right angles and straight lines. The city stars are quieter and more distant than in the forest, vastly different from the Argentine sky. He walks and walks, counting breaths that turn to frost. He walks until the moon loses its pull and the stars fade.

Then he turns to go back to the loft and read, or at least he thinks he does. Instead, he ends up on the sheriff’s porch, pulling out the key Stiles gave him months ago. 

He hears the sheriff’s steady heartbeat upstairs and is relieved he’s sleeping for a few hours; he spent the day at the cave and combing through the woods with Chris and only stopped his frantic activity for the few moments Melissa could make him sit. 

Derek slips off his shoes and moves on the pads of his feet to the kitchen, where he puts on a pot of coffee for the sheriff to drink in the morning. While it brews, he scavenges through the messy drawer where Stiles throws random teabags until he finds the vanilla chamomile. 

The bitter coffee smell soaks into him. Derek glances at the clock. He has enough time to sit at the table, rest his head, just for a moment until the tea finishes steeping. 

The next thing he knows, the sun is filling up the room and a blanket is covering his shoulders and his tea is cold and stale. A post-it note on the kitchen table reads, “Kid – I assume you know where the food is. Come to the station when you’re up to it.” 

For a moment he doesn't know what woke him, but then his cell phone rings for what must be the second or third time. He doesn’t recognize the number, but he answers anyway. 

“Hello?”

“Derek Hale,” says a voice he knows better than his own.

His throat goes dry. “Sti—“

“I’m afraid not,” the nogitsune answers with Stiles’ mouth, Stiles’ throat, Stiles’ tongue. “Not at the moment, anyway. Tonight, perhaps, if you find us.”

His body can’t decide whether it wants to throw up or throw the mug across the room. “Where are you?”

“The correct question is: where will we be tonight, and will your pack reach us in time?”

“In time for—“

“Derek?” He knows that scared voice, the one that’s Stiles’ but not Stiles’, from his August nightmares. “Derek, help me.”

It’s not Stiles, he knows it’s not, but he pleads for help like his heart is breaking and Derek’s on his feet yelling without knowing what he’s saying and he only stops when the thing on the other end of the line starts to laugh. 

“She moves quickly for a creature so old and gathered more help than I anticipated," it says. "Meet us in the woods tonight with your wolves, Derek Hale.”

“Where?”

“Oh, let’s make it simple for you. The clearing near your cabin should do nicely, don’t you think?”

“What time?”

“Your hunter knows the answer to that question, wolf. Start with him.”

"How will he--"

"He knows. Or possibly, he _will_ know, a little later. This mage jumbles his time when he listens to conversations through his imagined forest. It's quite frustrating. I may have to punish him."

"It's not his fault he--"

"Oh, I know it's not his fault, Derek Hale. Just as its not his fault his body shakes incessantly with withdrawal or screams to sleep at night. Neither makes him unworthy of punishment. Besides, I find myself bored, alone in this forest with nothing to torment."

He wants to yell or scream or crush the phone with his hands or loose his wolf to rend the world to pieces.

Instead, he says, “Let me talk to him. Just for a second.”

“Tonight, wolf. Be prepared.”

And it hangs up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Everyone. Yikes. Yiiiiikes @ me. I am so, so, so, so sorry. I didn't mean to drop off the face of the planet for a month and a half and I feel awful about it. I don't even know what happened except that I got all insecure and depressed and anxious about this weirdo story. Like!!! It took me a month and a half to write this, the shortest and most unhelpful chapter in the entiiire story, and I'm so so fuckin sorry. THE NEXT ONE IS EN ROUTE, I SWEAR.
> 
> Anyways, I love you, and thanks for sticking with me if you are still there and I'm so sorry for putting you through this!!! Okay, and also, I promise this isn't going to become a Lost-type situation where every chapter raises more questions without ever answering them. Like shit will actually happen next time, I swear, and I will do everything in my human power not to go MIA for that long again. 
> 
> If it's aaaaaany consolation at all, I'm simultaneously working on stories two and three of this series as well, though based on my pace that might be more of a nightmare to you than anything nice.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Valentine's Day! Love you all <3 Lots o' blood and death ahead; spoilery CW at the end for kinda suicidality?

He was wrong: the sunlight wasn’t filling up the room when he woke up but draining out of it. He’d slept nearly 12 hours. 

The sun is dying through the trees when he unlocks the Jeep on the driveway with Stiles’ keys, kicks the engine to life, and dials Scott, who puts the phone on speaker so the pack gathered in the sheriff’s office can hear him.

Derek doesn’t tell them that the voice on the phone was cruel, its laugh barbed wire instead of a mockingbird whoop. He only tells them that the nogitsune wants their protection, that it wants them to go to the clearing, and that Derek’s already on his way there.

“Derek, are you shitting me? Don’t be stupid. Come to the station first.”

“I’m not waiting, Lydia.”

“We don’t know what we’re fighting! This is idiotic! You’re—“

“It’s hunters,” says Chris. Derek hears the office door sweep shut behind him. “You’re up against hunters. She’s put out a bounty on Stiles with a bonus for taking out the rest of you. Free-for-all starts tonight at sundown.”

Erica swears. The sheriff’s hands hit the desk hard.

“Sunset’s in a half hour. Meet me there in twenty,” Derek says. He hangs up.

 

The nogitsune lounges on the burned-out porch steps, the sky behind it burning orange. It doesn’t look up when Derek slams the car door and strides towards the cabin. It doesn’t move at all, in fact, doesn’t drum Stiles’ fingers on the black wood or rock his leg up and down to an erratic beat no one else hears. It stays perfectly still, a body-shaped hollow where a soul should be.

The evening breeze throws Derek the familiar taste and scent of Stiles’ blood, but when the nogitsune stands, it doesn’t move like a human whose too-pale skin is a map of cuts and bruises. It’s fluid and graceful as a shadow, and apart from the blood, it doesn’t smell like anything but grave dirt and malice. 

“Let me talk to him,” Derek demands. 

The nogitsune’s grin doesn’t reach its eyes. “It amuses me that you see this as a negotiation,” it says. The sunset’s slant light carves Stiles’ cheekbones deeper than usual.

“Let me talk to him,” Derek repeats.

“What would you say to him if I did?”

Derek crosses his arm over his chest, and the nogitsune tilts Stiles’ head back and opens his mouth as if to swallow up the darkness. After a moment, Derek realizes it’s laughing. 

“As you wish,” it says, and suddenly the void where human scent should be swells with lavender tempered with clove, crimson pain, and hurt so fierce it bruises Derek’s chest. 

He steps forward, hands outstretched, but Stiles is on his knees, screaming. His hands shoot up to claw his hair and his body writhes on the dirt. Derek takes a step to help him, to make it stop, but while he watches a deep purple flame starts to rise from Stiles’ skin. The fire isn’t natural or calm like the light in Derek’s dreams. Instead, the flame looks wrung out of him, like screams a rack drags out of a body made visible. 

Derek tries to move closer but Stiles’ eyes flare a blinding, painful purple and Derek staggers back. Stiles grinds his palms into his eyes, but his hands are alight with fire, too, his whole body glowing. 

His screams shatter the air to shards and wrench Derek’s heart from his ribcage and then, as abruptly as they started, they stop, and Stiles’ scent cuts off so thoroughly it’s as if someone threw a cloak over Derek’s senses. 

The nogitsune pants in the dirt and pushes itself up. The purple in Stiles’ eyes shrinks to a ring around the pupil and the bright shock of flame running up his arms fades to a sickly glow. The nogitsune’s lips contort into a smile smeared with blood where Stiles bit his lip. 

Derek’s shaking. The creature opens its mouth, presumably to taunt him, but then Its violet eyes flick to a spot over Derek’s shoulder, which is all the warning Derek has before a bullet buries itself in his shoulder blade.

The pain and force propel him to all fours, but the bullet isn’t laced with anything and his skin’s already pushing it out and stitching back together. His muscles ripple, his world remakes itself in black and white and vivid sounds that trail sensations strong as color, and he dives for the hunter who shot him. The man’s warm blood fills his throat. 

Another gun goes off. Derek wheels around but the second hunter’s eyes are already glazed, her neck spiraled almost all the way around. Her body sends up a small cloud of dust when it hits the earth. He looks back at the nogitsune and sees Stiles’ extended hand wreathed in vicious violet light, darkness swelling in his eyes.

Noshiko steps out from the woods beyond the nogitsune, two slim knives clutched in her hands. The Oni follow, silvered feet skimming the ground and katana drawn and shimmering in the grim light from Stiles’ body. 

“Nogitsune,” Noshiko calls. She raises her knives. Derek bares his teeth and steps between her and Stiles’ body. Blood leaks from his shoulder and mouth.

“Noshiko,” the nogitsune says. It twists Stiles’ body into a mocking bow. “You’ve brought others with you, I see.” 

Without looking, the nogitsune flings a purple-coated hand behind it. Derek turns to see a hunter go down with her legs snapped. She screams until a force crushes her ribs, splintering them into her lungs. 

The creature tsks. “And playing unfairly, too. Cloaking scents? Please, Noshiko. Kitsune were made to be above such petty tricks.” Its teeth glint. Noshiko takes a step towards them but hesitates at Derek’s snarl. 

As the last daylight trickles from the horizon line, more human figures emerge from the tree line. Derek counts thirteen, then seventeen, then twenty, and then he’s out of time to count—Noshiko’s pointing at him with her knives and the hunters are stepping towards him and the rest of the pack still isn’t here but he has to act, now, or lose his heart. 

Derek tenses, preparing to run at them, but then the nogitsune rends the air with an inhuman sound that startles him. The clearing fills with a rushing noise less like wind than fire. He glances back and sees bruise-colored fire lashing Stiles’ arms, his eyes overflowing as he steps into a position that invites—welcomes—attack. 

The sound of fire and the smile wrecking Stiles’ face rip the air from Derek’s lungs, but he shakes imagined embers from his fur and sprints past the cabin. He leaps, extends his full length, hits the nearest hunter with his front paws. The man’s gun misfires at the sky and he goes down with Derek’s claws in his chest.

Derek hears a gun cock beside him and smells wolfsbane. Before he can react, an arrow hisses past and thuds into another hunter’s chest. Allison runs past him, crouches so a bullet breezes over her head, and buries a knife in a woman’s chest. As she spins back around, she pulls a handgun from her waist and shoots the hunter nearest Derek. 

Isaac’s white wolf lunges past him for another mark, and Erica’s a blur on the far side of the clearing, shredding tendons on hunters’ legs. The warmth of the pack’s presence pulls Derek up. He spins and sinks his teeth into the leg of the closest dark shape. 

Shrieks, gunshots, and howls ring through the woods as more wolves find targets. Kira darts through the clearing, fighting the Oni her mother sends towards her with a blade she uses as naturally as an extension of her arm. Derek hears more gunshots from near the spot he parked his car and wonders if Chris and the sheriff are there. 

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Noshiko circling the nogitsune, her tails whipping around her. Stiles dodges her knives with an eerie, inhuman agility, the bloodstained grin plastered on his face. Scott’s small, dark wolf stays close enough to the pair of them to lunge at stray hunters who break through the trees and escape the others’ teeth and claws.

His shoulder aches where it was shot, but he has full range of motion. He tackles a hunter who’s a second away from driving a curved knife between Lydia’s ribs while she’s distracted, binding a death spell around another person. As soon as his hunter goes down, Derek dashes across the clearing to rake the back of a woman aiming wolfsbane-tipped arrows at Boyd. Isaac's harsh yip stings Derek’s ears, and he leaps off the woman’s body and sprints alongside Erica to tackle the hunter who’s just shot Isaac through the front paw.

The minutes blur together. The wolf doesn’t track the number of human throats it rips out or the bellies it tears apart. It presses one thought to the front of his mind: keep the pack alive. Keep Stiles alive.

He doesn’t know how much time passes, but eventually, the flashes from guns start to fade. Yells die down. And then there are no more humans left to fight. 

Kira’s katana clashes against the Onis’ blades, but Allison’s running to back her up with Isaac and Erica. Lydia stays on the edge of the trees, weaving the scent of loam and death between her glowing hands with her eyes rolled back, only the whites showing. Derek doesn’t know what she’s doing, but like the others, he knows well enough to stay out of her way until she’s through. That leaves him and Boyd, who glances over at him. As one their two wolves run for Scott, Noshiko, and Stiles. 

“Your hunters are dead, Noshiko,” the nogitsune observes. The earth around it is scorched in a perfect circle. It throws out a burst of heat and light that makes beads of sweat stand out on Stiles’ forehead; Noshiko deflects it with a blade. “Don’t fret. You’ll join them soon.”

Suddenly, Kira yells and drives her sword through an Oni’s chest. It curdles to black smoke, and the small, cold lights of its eyes drop into the dirt where they flare once and then burn out. The other Oni pause and Kira stills too, just as startled as they are. A brief silence ripples through the clearing, but Noshiko breaks it by snarling and throwing a knife aside. Her skin sparks as she gathers energy in the palm of her hand. 

Scott throws himself between her and the nogitsune, growling, but Noshiko doesn’t lower her hand. Ozone snaps the air. Kira screams, “Mom!” but Noshiko ignores her. 

“I warned you, alpha,” she says, “You’re making a mis—“ 

But Boyd barrels into her, right at the knee. Derek hears something snap as she collapses. The ozone in the air dissipates. Boyd positions himself over her so she can’t stand, and she screams in fury.

“You are children,” she yells, trying to elbow herself up. Boyd growls and bares his teeth. “You have no idea of what—“ 

“They have no idea, but they’ll learn,” says the nogitsune, grinning wide as a cat. “Thank you, wolves, for keeping this body alive tonight. I regret that I can’t let my mage return the favor.” 

They don’t have time to react: the nogitsune simply throws out its arms, the fire in Stiles’ hands intensifies, and Derek’s world flickers and dies.

His wolf can’t see, hear, touch, feel anything besides the heat that suddenly roars along his bones, which bend and groan like wood in a fire. Now he knows how wrong he was to fixate on his brother’s flesh charring to paper, his dad’s eyes popping as the moisture in the air evaporated. Now he knows that burning alive means dying from the inside out, fire stripping the blood of oxygen, setting pyres in each cell and tarring the lungs closed. Heat winds up his spine and looks for a spot to settle in and strike its fatal blow, quick as a rattlesnake. He feels his body’s frame collapsing like the burning cabin’s walls—

The pain evaporates. He opens his eyes to see that the wolf is still on its feet, that the evening air doesn’t even smell like smoke but, oddly, of sage. Like Derek, everyone else in the pack is standing. They look startled but not dazed or in pain.

“Stiles!” 

The sheriff’s voice comes from Derek’s right. He glances over to see John and Chris running towards them with their guns out, John with a line of blood drawn across his forehead. 

“How…” the nogitsune says. Sudden rage darkens its face. “No, he can’t—“

But from beneath Boyd, Noshiko calls a single word in Japanese, and they never find out what the nogitsune is about to say, because a body—a corpse, it has to be, it has no heartbeat, no breath—on the other side of the clearing pushes itself up on its elbows. Derek’s already running for him even before he sees the gun in the man’s hands. He’s seconds away from tearing out his throat when Noshiko yells again and the man aims and shoots at Stiles.

He’s going to miss, though, the shot’s going to go wide, Derek can already tell as he leaps on the man and pins him down. It won’t hit Stiles, won’t even hit any of the wolves, it will— 

Stiles moves. Trips, more like, gracelessly true to Stiles’ form. Stumbles over his own feet, away from the circle of scorched earth, and tosses himself straight into the bullet’s path. 

Lydia screams.

The sheriff makes a noise so horrible the wolf won’t let Derek process it. Instead it sends him running straight for Scott, who’s shifting and reaching for Stiles’ crumpled body with both hands. But Stiles isn’t lying dead in the dirt where the bullet threw him. He’s sitting up, one hand clutching his side, his eyes completely, soullessly dark and his face painted black with rage. 

“What the f—“ Scott says, but the nogitsune makes a twisting motion with one hand that flings Scott back several feet, where he lands in a heap. Erica’s wolf pads towards Stiles, but the nogitsune throws a hand out and freezes her in place. 

“Stop,” he rasps. “No one touch him.” It takes Derek a second to realize that the nogitsune is referring to Stiles, not to Scott, who’s already pulling himself to his feet. 

The nogitsune pants. Blood spills out from between Stiles’ fingers. “Regrettable,” it spits. “How regrettable.”

“Okay,” says the sheriff. He sounds miles away. “Okay. Tell us what you want. We can help, we know a doctor, we can...” 

The nogitsune laughs, a short, painful burst. “If you want to see this body alive again, you’ll let us leave here with no interference before it bleeds to death. Do you understand?” 

No one moves. Derek sees the sheriff’s eyes go wider, sees Lydia shaking, hears Scott say, “We understand.”

“Good.” 

The nogitsune extends Stiles’ hand and pinches his thumb and index finger together. Carefully, it draws a line in the air that solidifies, sharpens, and falls to the earth. The nogitsune reaches for it with one hand. When it pulls the other away from Stiles’ hip and curls his fingers around it, it adds yet another ripple to the wave of blood in the air. 

“If you think—” Noshiko starts, but the sheriff raises his gun and points it at her. The nogitsune leers at him from Stiles’ blood-drained face. “Lovely,” it says and snaps the blade in two. A crack like lightning echoes through the clearing. And like that, the nogitsune’s gone.

Slowly, like he’s sleepwalking, the sheriff lowers his gun. Boyd steps back, letting Noshiko push herself to her feet. Noshiko snarls at the sheriff, but he raises his gun again and says, “The next time you threaten my son, I’ll kill you.” 

“You think that thing is your son?” Noshiko snaps back. “It’s evil. And clearly, whatever remains of your son will _thank_ me when I kill him.”

“Mom,” says Kira. Derek thinks she’s going to say something else, something angry, but then she sighs and lowers her sword wearily. “Call off your guards.”

“Come home with me,” Noshiko says. “ _Now,_ Kira.”

“I can’t,” Kira says. Scott limps towards her. “And I won't. You should be helping me, not…not trying to kill me. To kill us.”

Derek expects the words to be filled with tears or rage, but they’re neutral. Completely neutral, and maybe that’s what makes Noshiko stop. She doesn’t move for several moments, and then she says, “If you change your mind, Kira, come find me.”

Her tails flare to sudden life again and her eyes glow a shocking yellow. The light folds in on her. When the darkness floods back, she’s gone, the Oni dissolved to shadow.

The rest of them are left in the shellshocked darkness, staring across a field dotted with bodies like stones that wreck calm seas.

"What just _happened?_ " asks Chris. He spits blood to the ground. But no one answers as the sheriff sinks to his knees, as Lydia takes a shuddery breath, as the wolves start to painfully, carefully shift back. Isaac trails blood, stumbling towards Scott, and Boyd's right eye is swollen shut.

"There are clothes and blankets in the car," Allison says. She bends to yank a silver-tipped arrow from a hunter's body. Even in the darkness Derek can see that her hands shake.

Scott turns to Lydia. "You'll know?" He swallows. "You'll know if he..."

"I'll know," she says, hoarse.

"Derek, you can shift back now." Erica's voice in his ear. He didn't realize he hadn't.

"Derek?" she says again, and she puts a comforting hand on the back of his neck to settle his whine.

He wants to look up at her honey hair and the lines on her face. He wants to draw his strength from her and Boyd and Isaac and Scott and the rest, all of them his wolves even after fate required him to give them up.

But the mercurial human spinning at their center is no more than a fading light on the end of a dock. Derek shifts, but he doesn't know how he comes together, not when his own side has just been blown apart, his own blood splashed on the dirt; not when the thing holding him together more surely than sinews is gone. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> here's my suicide cw: Stiles throws himself in front of a bullet. more self-sacrificey than suicidey, though suicidality will come up a little later in the same ways you've already seen it mentioned in the story.
> 
> Next up: Reality reaches Stiles in fragments.


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> same cws/tws as the previous chapter! love to you all <3

Reality gets to him in fragments. A flash of sunlight here, tree bark brushing rough fingertips there. But the impressions jumble in his head, mixing with the hard ground and blank sky in the dream-forest where the nogitsune has him caged.

“Interesting,” it says when the wind blows them Deaton begging for his dead sister’s forgiveness, Cora shushing a fussy toddler, Melissa sighing over a patient. “Interesting, but not helpful.” And it pulls him deeper into the dream-forest where he hears Noshiko discussing his death and that of his friends with strangers whose low voices drip blood.

Whenever the nogitsune leaves him, Stiles flops on his back and talks to the pack, a distraction from the ache that radiates from his center to his fingertips.

“Do you think it remembers that humans need to eat?” he asks. “I’m fucking starving.”

He imagines Lydia, her tone clinical and detached and therefore comforting. “In contrast, it seems fine when it visits you. I wonder if it pins your body’s physical pain and discomfort to your psyche—or your soul, I suppose—so it doesn’t have to experience the same sensations.”

“So if it doesn’t eat anything, it’s fine, but I feel like shit inside this fucking brain-forest thing? That bitch is so fucking unfair.”

Erica smirks. “Takes one to know one.”

“Ha ha, very funny.”

“Better hope it doesn’t trip over its feet as much as you do, Stilinski, or you’ll be limping through your own head for the rest of your days.”

“Shut up, Isaac.” 

“Stilinski, if you're Imagining me talking to you, you’ve waived your right to tell me to shut up.”

_“Shut up, Isaac.”_

“Shut up yourself, dick.”

“Gu-uuys,” Scott whines. 

“Sco-ooott,” Stiles whines back. 

“This is a waste of time,” Derek sighs. Stiles pictures him with the bridge of his nose pinched between his fingers, eyes closed and eyebrows raised. 

“Can’t think of anything else to do,” Stiles says. Left to himself he’s prowled the dream-forest, wondering who else he could evict from his head. The only answer so far is Kira which, Derek’s imagined voice tells him, might mean she’s part of the pack now. He’d found her ghost-like fox form asleep, awash in pain so deep he could see it, and then encircled her in sage and sent her away with the others. 

The rest—strangers, his dad, Cora, Melissa—throw their voices through the trees no matter how hard he wills them not to. The nogitsune pries their impressions and scents from his branches and claims them as its own. 

“Honestly though, if I could go back in time and tell myself one thing, it would probably be: hey, Stiles, don’t wear your Iron Man pajamas to bed tonight, because, guess what, some witches are gonna kidnap you and you’ll picture yourself wearing them them until the day you fucking die, which, let’s be honest, is probably coming a lot sooner than you thought it would.”

“Stiles, if you make me say it again, I swear to god—“

“Lydia, what—? Oh. Right, right.” 

He imagines soft cotton on his bruised arms, pictures socks to cover his cold, torn-up feet. Finds himself wearing his favorite maroon hoodie and a worn-out pair of jeans. He sighs in relief.

Then, without warning, the thing appears in front of him.

It had just left him—for the third time, or maybe the fourth, and every other appearance had come after absences that Stiles’ dread spun into ages. It shouldn’t have come back so soon. 

Ignoring his full-body pain, Stiles tries to push himself out of the creature’s reach so he’ll have time to brace before it kicks him or drags him to his feet by the shoulders. Instead of taking either action, though, the nogitsune grins. Stiles freezes.

“One of your friends has requested your presence, mage,” it says. It kneels next to him and yanks his injured wrist up; Stiles hisses. “As he’s been very insistent, it would be rude of me to keep denying him. Do you agree?”

“Depends on the friend,” Stiles says, but his mind is already going blizzard-white with panic, heart thudding as fast as a rabbit fleeing a hawk, and the thing grins again and it draws him up, up, out of the grass, into…

A sound he doesn’t recognize rings in his ears. He’d fall if some other force weren’t fixing him in place. The sound starts to die and Stiles realizes it’s coming from his own mouth—the other force is making him laugh, and then it’s shaping the words, “As you wish,” and he opens his eyes and he’s looking straight at…

It’s only a moment, half a second, less than that. Only time to think _are you fucking_ _kidding_ me you fucking moron _you’re supposed to be safe in Argentina oh god what the fuck did I do,_ time to think _Derek, god, Derek—_

And then his body explodes with pain. He goes down and tastes blood. The nogitsune is pushing him from the inside out, pressing power from his veins until fire flows down his arms. Stiles can’t do anything but scream and scream and dig the heels of his hands into his eyes, desperate to keep the power from spilling out but he can’t, he can’t, he—

He falls and hits the earth and he’s back in his dream-forest, body rigid with shock. He bends forward and claws his hair with his hands heedless of the slits across them because Derek’s facing Stiles’ body alight with flame. He doesn’t know what he’s yelling, maybe Derek’s name, maybe _please no please no please please_ in great sobbing gasps, but he looks up and sees a spot of darkness, sheer darkness, not the blank, unending sky he’s used to. 

He shoves himself to his feet, angrily rubs his arm across his wet eyes, claws his way back up, and he’s back in his body with power stretching from his fingertips. Someone’s dying at his feet, but it’s not Derek. It’s a woman he doesn’t recognize, her blond hair a frothing halo around her head as the nogitsune uses Stiles’ power to snap her spine. The forest—the real forest—is in chaos, wolves tearing past him, and Noshiko— 

The nogitsune growls at him, tosses him into the dream-forest prison, but when it dragged him up that first time it gave him a foothold, and now he throws himself at it again and again and again, screaming with rage, his face hot with tears that coat his cheeks like blood.

It’s too fast, even when it’s drawing Stiles’ power out of him and thrusting it into spines and necks and brittle bones, it’s too clever and strong for him to force his way in, until the bitter scent of sage suddenly floods the forests, both real and imagined, and Stiles staggers. He goes completely numb, then thinks, _oh god, please let it have worked please let that mean it worked,_ throws himself again—

He sees the dark clearing. Bodies lie in heaps, but he makes his eyes skip over them to instead find each member of the pack. And they’re alive, on their feet, Scott and Boyd beside him and Derek’s growls from a spot a few feet away. 

He feels his own elation at the same time as he feels the nogitsune’s shock and then its rage. It’s about to use his mouth to say something, but then his dad runs out of the trees, into the clearing.

“Stiles!” he yells. His gun is out. There’s blood on his face. 

“No, he can’t…” the nogitsune says with Stiles’ mouth. But his dad is staring at him with an agony that splits Stiles open, more jagged and more effective than an axe, and his world falls out from under him. 

Noshiko yells a command that translates itself as Stiles hears it—show yourself now, and act!—and a bullet cuts the night air in two.

The hunter Noshiko concealed from the wolves is going to miss the shot, though. The nogitsune doesn’t bother to move; smugness ripples through him, and Stiles realizes—it doesn’t know he’s there. 

So Stiles _shoves._ He pushes the nogitsune sideways and lets his clumsy body do the rest of the work. 

He thought it would hurt, but he only feels something slam into his hip, hard, and the rest of his body spin to follow it. So simple he might be dancing. The ground rises to him, hot, but as soon as he hits it, the dirt turns to a black puddle. His thoughts leak out through a hole in his side and take all the world’s warmth with them. 

_Idiot,_ he hears. The word would scorch if he weren’t safely ensconced in ice. He wishes he could wave goodbye sarcastically or flip the voice off, which seems like a fitting final action, but before he can, the world goes black.

 

 

 _This won’t be much worse,_ she’d said, red lips curving up, _I can at least promise you that._ But if that’s true then why are branches scraping his skin? Why can’t he feel his fingers, why is he on his back, why is he being dragged inch by painful inch across the dirt? The thing tugging him forward yanks too hard and he hits his right side. Whatever the ground touches there is so painful that it throws the darkness over him again.

 

 

“Mage,” someone says in the darkness, and he’d laugh if he could because the voice is his own. What an odd afterlife he’s found himself in. 

“Mage, I lose my patience,” Stiles hears himself saying. His voice is red with such shocking pain that Stiles almost winces in sympathy. “Hold this.”

Something sharp in his hands. He tries to curl his fingers around it, he really does, but his hands are wet and slick and it slips through them like a fish. He tries to apologize but his mouth won’t move. Or maybe it does—his own voice curses him, and then the blade is back in his hands. Another pair of hands encases his own. He tries to blink them into focus as they push his hands down until the blade snaps. A flash of light rocks him into the ground, into blackness.

 

 

“Too warm,” says Lydia. Her red hair brushes in his face; her fingers are drops of rain on his hot skin. “You’re too warm, Stiles.”

“Sagittarius,” he agrees. “Sapphires. Burundi.”

The next time he wakes up, there’s a man sitting next to him, or maybe a wolf, or several men and one wolf, or one man and several wolves, or maybe he’s alone. All of the wolves’ ears point forward. All of the men’s ears point back. Stiles closes his eyes. 

His own face peers down at him, but he doesn’t think it’s really his face, because he’s sure he’s never looked so ill or so empty in his entire life. “You’ll pay for it, my mage,” the other Stiles says. “You and your family both.”

The Aurora Borealis spreads over him. It’s as pretty as he always thought it would be. The lights kiss the tops of the trees and then dance away, green and blue spurs waltzing together. He wishes he could follow them to wherever they’re going. 

 

 

He knows he’s coherent because when he looks straight through the trees, he thinks, _dammit, back in the dream-forest,_ then, _dad oh hell dad_ and then _Jesus fuck. Derek’s never going to forgive me._

His first instinct is to sit up, but the pain that didn’t hit him when the bullet struck is now lodged deep in his bones. It also seems to be in the space between the bones, as well as in the bits of oxygen his cells ferry from organ to organ. Awesome.

Carefully, he raises a hand to his forehead. It’s warm, but not as warm as it was before, however long ago it was that he saw fever-lights in his forest. He tries again to prop himself up on his elbows, but pain keeps him down more effectively than gravity. 

A few feet away, a twig snaps under someone’s foot. 

“You’re awake,” the nogitsune says, stepping out from the trees. Stiles tenses automatically, which makes his ribs groan, which in turn makes him cringe and trigger a host of other pains he hasn’t yet explored.

He freezes, bracing for the creature to greet him with its customary kick to the gut. But the not-Stiles moves slowly and painfully with one of its hands pressed to its right side. If the nogitsune’s appearance is anything to go on, his body has lost weight he definitely couldn’t afford to lose. His eyes are bright with a slight fever. Instead of moving precisely as a cat, the nogitsune hunches in on itself. 

_It hasn’t felt this much pain since it almost died,_ Stiles thinks, and doesn’t know whether to feel smug or horrified or something else entirely. The look on his dad’s face flashes in front of him.

“You nearly killed us both. Does it please you to hear that, mage?” 

Yes. It does. _He’s never going to forgive me._

“Clearly, you didn’t succeed. And in a few days, after your body and your soul have healed still more, I’ll transfer the pain you and I currently split entirely to you.”

Stiles clears his throat. “Bite me,” he says.

The creature’s face stays blank. “As soon as you’re well, you’re going to strip that protective spell from your pack members’ skin. And then you’ll rend muscle from muscle and strip skin from bone. Only then will I allow the necromancer to let them die.”

Stiles isn’t sure what to say to that, so he says nothing, and eventually the creature disappears from the forest.

 _King of a crumbling castle,_ Stiles thinks with satisfaction, but quick as it left him, panic flows back over him like a bird settling into a nest. And he knows—he has to act. Now.

So the bullet didn’t work. The spell won’t hold forever. Fine. He thinks he knows what will. 

“I know you could help me figure this out if you wanted to,” he tells his imagined voices, but Derek’s too mad to speak to him. And his dull, quiet fever is slowly draining the color from everything; not even Lydia’s voice has as much snap when he conjures it in the dark woods. 

Once it’s done, it’ll be over. But it has to be for real this time, not like with the bullet.

“Is that why you won’t help me, you fucking asshole?” he mutters. “Will you feel better if I say I never should have kicked you out of my head?”

Silence. 

“Fine. I shouldn’t have kicked you out of my head. Happy?” 

Apparently not, because Derek doesn’t answer.

“Jesus shit,” Stiles swears. “You’re the one who walked into my head in the first place, remember? I didn’t ask you to follow me around, I couldn’t even see you, I—“

He blinks. “I couldn’t see you, and then you wouldn't go, and then I made you real.”

He has to move, has no choice, so he doesn’t think about it. He rolls onto his uninjured side and grunts as he pushes himself up. The trees blur, but he doesn’t pass out. He takes a breath. 

“Come on, come on,” he says. “Come on, I know you’re here, you stubborn asshole, I know you’re here.”

And there—a gruff whoosh of air, like a wolf laughing once through its nose. 

“Yes,” Stiles says. “Yes, yes, one memory, come on, Derek, just give me something—“

But when the wind blows a sound to him through the trees, he doesn’t hear Derek’s voice. He hears his own.

 _Oh, uh, sorry man, we didn’t know._ And the bones of the shock that ran through him when he’d met Derek’s eyes that morning and thought, Holy shit, that’s Derek Hale.

“Okay, okay,” he breathes to himself. He tries to keep himself from trembling, but it’s impossible. “You followed me into my dreams, and I don't think you ever really left, you stupid idiot, so I can follow you into yours. Right? Right,” he answers himself. 

“This has to work. This has to work.” _This has to work. This will work. It will work. It works, it works, it’s working…_

Stiles closes his eyes and lets the memory echo through him from out of the trees— _oh, sorry man, we didn’t…sorry, we…I didn’t know, we…_

Moss cushions his knees and he grabs it with one hand, trying to take his mind off the heat in his side. He tries to conjure his flame to his other hand, but his mind flinches back, remembering the power coursing through him, the woman’s bones splintering, the— _no. It has to work, it has to work, it’s working._

He shivers and lets his hand fill with flame. 

“Oh, sorry man, we didn’t know,” he murmurs, in time with the words winding through the branches, out of the past. “Sorry, Derek, I didn’t know. I’m sorry, Derek, I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Derek. I'm sorry.”

Something wet and cold presses against his warm skin. He hears a chuff of dog-like reassurance masquerading as annoyance. He opens his eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> song for this chapter: frozen pines, lord huron


	16. Chapter 16

“Derek.”

He hears the whisper and opens his eyes to Stiles’ face, so close Derek can count his freckles.

“I’m dreaming,” Derek says. 

“Kind of,” Stiles says. “But kind of not.”

Derek sits up. He’s no longer in bed; he’s alone with Stiles in a blank, grey world. Small white tendrils lick Stiles’ arms but—Derek glances down—they don’t touch Derek at all. 

“You…” Derek says. “It’s you? You’re alive?” 

“I mean, you’re still dreaming, but this is like, totally me. I did it. I found you.” He smiles, tired and worn but as goddamn pleased with himself as always. 

It’s been days since the battle in the clearing; days, and Lydia’s said he’s not dead, but he didn’t entirely believe her until just now, staring stupidly at the deranged, self-congratulatory smile that knocks the breath out of him. 

His first instinct is to reach out and throttle him. His second is to touch his finger to Stiles’ crooked lips and smooth them out. His third is to yell himself hoarse. But— _wait,_ his wolf growls. _Look._

And Derek forces himself to look through the fact of Stiles’ miraculous, improbable existence. _Oh,_ he thinks. _Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh_

The smaller details are easier for his brain to catalogue. Stiles’ left cheek is swollen and covered in a truly spectacular bruise, and marks the size and shape of fingerprints dot his arms. The thick circles around his sunken, over-bright eyes could have been painted on. By the way he keeps his left wrist close to his side, Derek thinks it’s sprained or broken. 

Then the larger ones. From here, Derek can tell that Stiles is several degrees too warm, his eyes over-bright. The Spark is porcelain-pale; a whisper would shatter him. Stiles breathes shallowly, as if a full breath will hurt his ribs. His right side is so raw with pain that Derek can’t look at it straight on; he sees it like a bitter, swarming blackness that radiates heat to every corner of Stiles’ body. 

“Jesus, Stiles,” Derek finally says. “Jesus.” And then, like the complete fucking idiot he is and always has been and always will be, so help him god, he asks, “How are you?”

“Oh, you know,” Stiles says, his mouth twisting on the words. Derek keeps himself from cringing, but only just. 

Derek opens his mouth—to apologize or confess or do something else entirely—but Stiles speaks first. “Look, I don’t think I have that much time,” he says, twitching his uninjured wrist to shake off the white tendrils. Within a few seconds they restart their slow curl.

The words on Derek’s tongue evaporate. “What do you need?” he asks. 

“I have to give you something,” Stiles says. He clears his throat. “Or I mean, like, I don’t have to give it to you and you’re not obligated to take it, but it could be the only thing that works and maybe it’ll save you and also, like, the entire world, so it would be cool and helpful, probably, if you could take it.” 

One of Derek’s eyebrows hops up, and Stiles stumbles over his words. “And also, um, you’re the only one I can reach and it’s kind of a help-me-Obi-Wan-Kenobi-you're-my-only-hope type situation, but I don’t think that means you have to keep it if I can even give it to you. And I don’t know, maybe you can pass it on to whoever the Luke is in your life because I swear to god, Derek, I would never force you to take it, you know what I mean? Like I would never, literally _never,_ and you don’t have to—“ 

“Stiles,” Derek says. “I know you wouldn’t.”

“You do?”

Derek rolls his eyes. “Idiot. If I’m Ob-Wan in your stupid metaphor, you’re definitely Luke.”

“Aw, come on, I always considered myself more of like, a Leia figure than a—“

“There is _no_ reality in which you’re more Leia than Luke.”

“Jackass,” Stiles says with a slant grin that eases some of the tightness in Derek’s chest. Then Stiles grimaces and his right hand rises compulsively to hover near his side.

“Okay. So." He takes as deep a breath as he can manage. “It’s winning. It’s going to make me kill you and I don’t think I can stop it.”

“Stiles, it’s not your fault.” 

“It’s not that,” Stiles says, shaking his head. “Well, it’s a little bit that. But there’s, like, no scenario where you guys beat this thing and we all walk away, not if it can use me to, like…you know.”

Crushing heat, air evaporating from skin. “You stopped it. It didn’t kill us.”

“Sure, last time. But the ward I did wears off eventually, and I can’t ward everyone in the whole damn world.” 

“Fine,” he says. “So what do you want to give me?”

“I think…” In defiance of the wisps dragging at him, Stiles drums his fingers against his thumb. “Okay. Because of that blood seal, the…the thing is trapped inside me forever, right?”

Derek scowls. “Only because we haven’t figured out how to—“

“Trapped inside me _forever,_ ” Stiles repeats, still drumming and not meeting Derek's eyes. “But what if we could use that to our advantage?”

Derek’s eyes narrow. Stiles, noticing, speaks faster. “It only sealed itself in because it wants my power, right? So what if it were sealed inside me, but…it didn’t have any of my power?”

And Derek realizes what Stiles is offering. “No. Absolutely not,” he says.

“Dereeeeeek,” Stiles mock-whines. “Come on. It would be a defenseless high school kid who Isn’t exactly in peak physical condition at the _best_ of times, and--”

“You aren't seriously asking me this.”

Stiles' pace increases even more. “I mean, okay, you’d have to deal with its spooky weird nogitsune power, but it won’t have mine and it’s not, like, fully healed from being, um, shot, and Noshiko and Kira will help you with the fox-demon-related stuff so I feel like it won’t be too much of a challenge for you guys, especially not when compared to a fricking kanima or psycho alpha pack.”

“I’m not letting you give me your power to make it easier for Noshiko to fucking kill you,” Derek snarls.

“She’s not killing _me,”_ Stiles snaps back. “It’s not me anymore, and I can’t fucking stand it, Der, I can’t stand letting this happen, it’s—”

“Stiles, it’s not your fault.” 

“I don’t _fucking care,_ ” and his voice rises, curls in on itself, breaks as whatever was holding him together falls apart. “God, I can’t tell what’s real anymore, I can’t tell what’s me and what’s him and this is the only part of me I know is really me, okay? I need it to make fucking sense to you, Der. I need to know he can’t keep touching it, it’s like fingers running through me every time, making me—“

Stiles gags. His hands clutch his hair like he’s going to rip it out. 

“I’d rather die,” he says. “I’d rather die, I’d rather die, I’d rather die, I’d rather die, I’d rather…”

It’s worse, even, than the bullet dancing Stiles backwards in the clearing. Derek’s core is unraveling on his knees in front of him. Derek hears himself saying, “I know, I know,” in the same tone he’d use to talk down a frightened wolf. “I know,” he says, and Stiles’ tense body unwinds, tilts towards him. 

Accepting the knife his heart will use to kill itself should swell the scene with black self-loathing. He shouldn’t be able to breathe through the smothering guilt and fury, thick as smoke. Instead, he feels a sudden, clarifying calm.

“There’s something I should tell you,” Derek says. “I should have told you forever ago.” 

Stiles unclenches his fists. His hands fall to his sides, and he looks at Derek like he’s drowning, a breath away from letting go. 

He can do it. He can be the solid strength a dying man leans on so he can turn and toss himself into darkness.

He can make himself the anchor.

“Spit it out, jerk,” Stiles says.

“I love you,” Derek says. 

Stiles makes a noise that takes Derek a second to place before he realizes it’s a huff of ragged laughter.

His heart almost stops, but then Stiles says, “God. Goddammit." And now maybe Derek's hallucinating, because the next words out of Stiles' mouth are, "I love you too, you absolute asshole.”

The pounding in Derek's ears dies down. He huffs. “That doesn’t explain why you're laughing." 

“I mean, this isn’t exactly happening the way I imagined it.”

“Really?" He raises an eyebrow. "What were you imagining?”

In spite of his bruising cheek, Stiles grins sharply. “Oh, endless wicked fantasies, obviously.” 

When Derek leans forward, so does Stiles. “You’ll have to settle for this,” Derek says.

“Do I look like I’m complaining?” 

"A little."

When he curls his fingers around the back of Stiles’ neck, Stiles’ breath hitches. “Does that hurt?” Derek asks. “No,” Stiles breathes, even though it does. 

Derek raises his other hand to run his thumb along Stiles’ lip. Stiles shivers and closes his eyes, and Derek kisses him.

Stiles kisses him back.

And it’s everything. It’s the heady rush of clove and nutmeg and lavender that floods all his senses at once. It’s Stiles’ teeth on his lip, his hot fingers cupping Derek’s cheeks and running through his hair. It’s Derek’s hand under Stiles’ thin shirt, fingers carefully climbing the ribs of his uninjured side like the rungs of a ladder and tracing patterns on his shoulder blade. It’s Stiles’ breath catching with every press of Derek’s fingertip against his too-warm skin, like each point illuminates him. It’s salt from Stiles’ tears on Derek’s lips. It’s— 

“Don’t cry when I’m kissing you,” he murmurs against Stiles’ throat.

“Can’t help it,” Stiles says. “Der, I—“ 

But Derek covers Stiles’ mouth with his own, and Stiles sinks back to him.

Seconds fold in on themselves and break apart again. They’re hungry for every detail, bodies waking up—Stiles’ good hipbone light and rising to Derek’s touch, the roughness of his neck on Derek’s own, mouths bruising against each other and small gasps that remind Derek of the sound the earth makes when rain touches it, and then Stiles says, “It’s waking up,” and Derek looks to see the wisps around Stiles becoming more solid. 

Stiles’ good cheek is pressed to Derek’s shoulder, his arm wrapped around Derek’s neck like he doesn’t know how to let go. “I’m ready,” Derek says.

“It’s fire, Der,” Stiles says against his skin. “It’s fire, it’ll hurt you, god, I can’t believe I’m asking you—“

“Stop,” Derek says. “I’m ready.” When Stiles clutches his fists like he wants to wrench his own hair again, Derek untangles Stiles’ fingers. He brings each one to his mouth as Stiles shakes, waves rippling through his body. 

“Once I’m…once it’s…dead, I think the spark will just…disappear. And you’ll be…you’ll be okay, again.”

 _Nothing will ever be okay again,_ he thinks, but he won’t make those his last words to Stiles, so he nods, throat tight. 

“Take care of yourself,” Stiles says, searching Derek’s face, and then Stiles is falling forward and Derek’s there to meet him and nothing matters as much as Stiles’ lips on his lips, Stiles’ fingers around the back of his neck, Stiles’ tongue tracing his lips and Derek opening his mouth greedily, and suddenly—

Suddenly, Derek’s lit up from the inside. Warmth gathers in his chest and spreads between his ribs. The wolf shivers and stretches with the pain and pleasure of it, and Stiles’ hands grow hot around him, and for the briefest moment, Stiles pulls back and looks at Derek with purple flame in his eyes, bruised and feverish and eyes glowing like Derek’s the most luminous thing he’s ever seen, and then—

He wakes up. He’s back in his own bed, in the loft. He holds his hands in front of his face and sees a warm lavender glow seep slowly into his skin. The ends of his fingers tingle. Stiles’ taste lingers on his lips. 

And there’s a hollow in his chest. It aches, not with fire but with a burning loss that throws him open over and over again while the scent of nutmeg fades from the bedroom.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay, not to be obnoxious, but this is my favorite chapter. thanks for bearing with me, you beauties. new chapter coming soon. 
> 
> self-indulgent song for this chapter (but seriously, please, I'm on my knees begging you, go listen to this incredible amazing life-changing song): Interlude (Live), by London Grammar.
> 
> xoxox


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I literally will never be able to apologize enough for how goddamn SLOW I AM. To be fair, it says so in the tags, but like, j e s u s . I just am...eternally sorry. Sorry forever. If I could make you all apology brownies, I'd do it in a heartbeat. 
> 
> same small suicide tws you saw in the previous chapter!

Two moments stand out to him clearly from the day of the fire. In the first, the principal opens the door to Derek’s classroom, and he’s hit with a wave of fear and horror and pity from her that he doesn’t understand. He sees Laura’s pale face behind her and knows that whatever they’ve come to tell him, it will change everything.

In the second, he and Laura are in a police car, being driven to the station, when Laura starts shrieking. She presses her hands to her eyes to keep the startled cops from seeing them flare red, and Derek throws his hands over his ears and hunches forward. She feels the weight of her mother dying, transferring the alpha power to her, and he feels the old golden bond snap and the new one fuse into place. When it’s over they shudder and clutch each other. The cops cover them with blankets that scratch his skin.

The rest of the day is shrouded in haze punctuated with faint impressions: burnt bodies in the ash, Laura’s hand in his, heat from the dirt rising through his shoes.

The day Laura died was the same. The immediate pain when the bond between them grew tight and splintered, and, later, the sight of her body in the ground are lights on an otherwise dark road. Incidentally, so is the buzz-cut boy with a target on his chest, surprise turning his mouth wide and beautiful. He made Derek so goddamn _mad,_ the idiot standing in the frost and stuttering and biting his stupid knuckle. The feeling pierced his numbness and pulled him away from the edge he nearly slipped over. 

He’s fallen into sleep alone and fallen out of it with Stiles’ spark attached. He knows for sure that Stiles isn’t coming back. He gets out of bed, pulls his pajamas off and his jeans on, rinses his face in the sink, and waits for the fog that accompanies the moments when his world shatters and can’t be remade to roll in. But it doesn’t come, and he locks the door behind him and clatters down the stairs to the Camaro. 

Maybe it’s the kiss. Maybe it’s being the anchor instead of grasping at one. Maybe it’s the ghost of Stiles’ thin fingers on his face or the prickling warmth beneath his skin. Maybe it’s simply that Stiles is in pain and that Derek can end it.

Either way, Derek turns the key and knows that once it’s over, his life will go up in flames like it was always meant to. But for now, he conjures the pack with the phone at his fingertips and speeds to meet them at Scott’s house, a purple hum along his bones driving him on. Every moment echoes with Stiles’ gasps against his skin, each one a gift. Every moment is so clear and sharp it’s painful.

Scott opens the door in boxers and a t-shirt, scrubbing a hand across his eyes. None of them have slept much over the last four days—all they’ve done is watch the woods and wait for Lydia’s scream. “Hey dude,” Scott says, and then his tired eyes focus. “Wait, hang on, what the fuck is—“

He hears growls and a sharp whine from the living room. Scott yanks Derek into the foyer, slams the door shut behind him, and buries his nose in Derek’s neck.

“Why do you _smell_ like him?” Scott wails. Erica, Boyd, and Isaac crowd behind him, yelping, Allison and Lydia following slower. The sheriff, drinking coffee in the hall while talking to Melissa and Kira, freezes.

The humans, necromancer, and kitsune step back so the wolves can press closer to Derek and drag him into the living room, where they perch around him on the couch. Traces of Stiles’ scent linger in the room and mix with the bitter coffee. For a moment they’re a full pack again, a mess of wolves and humans inextricably bound. A family, complete and whole.

Then Derek starts talking. 

Stiles’ bruised face hovers in front of him, eyes too bright. Derek focuses on him, not on the quiet, pained noises the sheriff makes as Derek tells them how Stiles looked, not on Melissa’s hand parting the air to meet John’s back, not on Scott trembling next to him. He tells them what Stiles said about sealing the nogitsune inside his body, leaving it largely powerless, tries to shut out Scott’s pained whine. And then he doesn’t know what to say.

“Derek?”

He blinks. 

“Derek, then what?” Lydia presses.

Derek clears his throat. “Then he…then he gave it to me.”

“Wait, you took it? You _actually_ did it?” Scott’s suddenly on his feet. His eyes flare and everyone but Derek flinches.

“Yes,” he says, meeting Scott’s glare. “I’d do it again.”

“Then you killed him,” Scott snarls. “No, it’s worse, he asked you to help him kill _himself,_ and you’re going to.”

“You didn’t see him,” he says, calmly. “If he’d asked you…“ and he shifts his gaze from Scott to the sheriff, needing him to know. John doesn’t look away. “You’d do the same thing.” 

“How can you say that?” Scott says, and as suddenly as it appeared the color bleeds from his eyes. He slumps. “How could you do it?”

The wolf’s voice rises in Derek’s throat, twines with his own. “He needed us to. And so we did it.”

Lydia says, sounding annoyed and not the least bit cowed by his wolf, “I didn’t know something like that was even possible. How do you know it worked?” 

“It worked,” Derek and his wolf say. And his eyes feel hot and wet, and Lydia hisses. His eyes are flaring, he knows. But he doesn’t think they both show blue. 

“Fine. How’d you do it then?” Lydia asks. 

“Oh.” The wolf slinks away with a sharp grin, leaving him on his own. He feels heat rise to his cheeks, raises a hand to rub the back of his suddenly warm neck. “I mean, I don’t think either of us really knew what to do. So he, uh…I mean, we…we just kind of…I mean, we got a little distracted by…and then we…um.” He trails off. 

“Oh my god,” Erica says, and then “ _Oh_ my _god!_ You _kissed_ him!” When Derek doesn’t answer, she cackles and throws herself back into the couch. 

Scott snorts, then his eyes widen. “Holy shit, you totally did.” 

Isaac smirks. “ _He gave it to me?_ You meant that as dirty as it sounded?” 

Derek doesn’t remember the last time he blushed this furiously. Possibly never. “Christ, Isaac, not _exactly_ as—“ 

“Okay, okay, this is crucial, Derek,” Erica says, leaning forward. “Who kissed who?” 

“Who kissed whom,” Lydia corrects.

“What’re you…”

“Derek, it’s a simple question. Did he kiss you, or did you kiss him?”

“Um,” he says. “It was. Um. The second one.”

Scott groans and Lydia looks smug. Boyd holds out a hand and Derek watches, nonplussed, as the rest of the pack pulls out wallets and extracts bills. Kira gives him a half-apologetic smile as she does so. It takes him a moment of watching them hand cash to Boyd before he realizes. 

“Are you serious?”

“Oh, please, like you didn’t bet on me and Allison.”

“I bet _against_ you. How long has this been going on?”

“Absolutely ages,” Isaac drawls. “And every month we raised the stakes. The pool’s fucking huge.”

Erica says, “One day I’ll learn to stop betting against you, babe.”

“Doubt it,” Boyd says, kissing her cheek. 

Melissa sighs and puts her money Boyd’s hands before he counts the cash and divides it three ways. Lydia reaches out for her share, and so does—Derek’s eyebrows shoot up—the sheriff, who shrugs at him. 

“Never bet against Boyd,” he says. 

“We expect the rest in checks,” Lydia says. “Or on Venmo. Split whatever owe equally between the three of us.”

“Cora’s in too, but she Cora bet on Stiles kissing you, not you kissing him,” Erica tells him. 

“She’s gonna be pissed,” Scott says. 

Maybe the carpet will rise and swallow him and he can live out the rest of his days as a humiliated rug on the McCalls’ floor.

 _I’ll never kiss him again,_ Derek thinks. And as if everyone else has had their own version of the thought, the semi-hysterical ebullience disappears from the room. 

Scott sinks back into the couch and puts his head in his hands. “I can’t do it,” he says. “I don’t know how to do this.”

Derek’s mom would put a comforting hand to the back of his neck when he needed calming down; when he tentatively puts his on Scott’s neck, Scott leans into it.

“We can do it if it’s what he needs,” Derek says. 

Scott shudders under his hand. “I can’t.”

“You can,” says the sheriff, his voice unrecognizable. When Derek looks over, John’s face is twisted into a stranger’s. “You will, because she’ll only do it over my dead body.” 

“John,” Scott says. “I’m sure there’s…”

The sheriff stands up abruptly. “I’m going on a drive. When I get back, you tell me how to kill my son and that thing possessing him.” As he leaves Melissa puts her head in her hands, mirror image to Scott. 

Boyd breaks the silence. “How long can we wait?” 

“Not long.” 

“There’s always another way,” Scott murmurs, words muffled by his hands. “There has to be another way.” 

“Lyd,” Allison says. “The seal. You’re sure there’s nothing you can…”

“The only thing that breaks it is death,” Lydia says. Her eyes flick to Derek’s, and he thinks he sees something different from the emptiness in everyone else’s. But then she looks away and looses Allison’s hand. “So let’s learn how to kill a nogitsune.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> again, endless apologies, I am ashamed and slinking back to my cave of despair now, where I will continue to pound away at this ridiculous mess. 
> 
> song for this chapter: ghost of the mountain, tired pony


	18. Chapter 18

When he opens his eyes, the forest is grey. When closes them the world turns crimson or black. He lies on his left side and breathes shallowly.

He doesn’t remember much of what it did to him once it realized. Only the part where it splayed Stiles beneath him and pressed hands to his chest. Pain flowed through its body to his, or maybe it sucked the last of his energy from his body to its, or maybe both. It hardly mattered at that point. 

“You haven’t deterred me,” it crooned, breath hot on his cheek as it pinned him down. “Soon they’ll be dead.” And it vanished, taking all his strength with it. 

Eyes closed, Stiles trails a finger up a large scar on his calf, trying to remember what caused it. He touches the ribs Derek’s fingers brushed like they were cathedral walls, holy. 

Both times he died in ice, he felt something lift from his chest before the pack—Scott, Derek, Lydia—called him back. He felt nothing besides weightlessness. A sort of peace. He wonders if this death will feel the same way, or if it’ll be akin to what should have been his third and final death in the cave. Slow and painful but finally over, like Maren promised. 

They don’t abandon him. He talks out loud to them when he can breathe. Someone runs fingers through his hair. At first he thinks he’s imagined Scott or Derek, but the impression of purple besides the stillness makes him think it’s his mother. He doesn’t mean to cry when she leaves him, but he can’t seem to stop. 

He says goodbye. Then there’s nothing left to do but wait.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> seriously, these two chapters are such little payoff for you having to wait a goddamn month, and i just....am sorry forever. yikes @ me 
> 
> song for this chapter: tomorrow, daughter


	19. Chapter 19

They spend the rest of the day researching, which means going over the same sources they’ve read hundreds of times in the past weeks. 

As far as they can figure, only four nogitsune have existed, ever, and the resources on them are few and far between. Scans of obscure, thousand-year-old Japanese texts told them that two were killed with magical weapons granted by Inari. The other was defeated with a foxtail blade the nogitsune made for itself, stolen by some hero and turned against it. But as they lack magic swords, the knowledge doesn’t do them much good. 

It would help if they knew how _their_ nogitsune was defeated, but none of the texts mention it. Kira doesn’t know, and it’s not like they can ask Noshiko.

Boyd shrugs. “She wouldn’t help us anyway.” 

“Maybe she would now we’re trying to kill him,” Isaac mutters. He looks away when Scott’s eyes flash to him. 

When Erica points out that whatever Noshiko did centuries ago, it didn’t exactly work, Lydia snaps, “If you have a more effective solution, I’d _love_ to hear it.” No one reacts to her fury; it’s a welcome distraction from the fact that they’re searching for the most effective way to murder Stiles. 

The sheriff isn’t back by late afternoon when Boyd and Erica leave to grab them all some Wendy’s. Melissa eats her frosty and double stack on her living room carpet, back against the couch and legs on the coffee table while she scans arcana forums on her tablet. When Scott’s anxiety grows too big for the room and he and Lydia can’t stop sniping at each other, he leaves for a run. Derek sends Isaac with him with a look, not wanting Scott to be alone. 

Kira won’t stop yawning, the half-healed aura of pain around her angry and white. But she’s the only one who can read Japanese, and even though she gets paler as the day goes on, she doesn’t quit. Her dad calls a few times, but she doesn’t answer. Derek’s wondered what their interactions are like at school when she and the other pack members show up, but he doesn’t see the point in asking.

Occasionally, Derek feels Lydia’s eyes on him, but it isn’t until she throws a book across the room—a first, but Derek’s experienced a lot of firsts in the last twelve hours—that she stands up and announces, “Derek and I are walking to Stiles’. The rest of you are staying here and reading.”

Allison glances at her sharply. Derek sets down the book he’s spent the last half hour skimming without processing, stretches, and gets to his feet. 

“I’ll be back in thirty minutes,” Lydia tells Allison, who exchanges a look with Derek at the missing “we.”

The wind stirs the corpses of leaves on the trees lining the sidewalk as Derek matches Lydia’s furious pace down the familiar roads. It isn’t until the reach the corner of Stiles’ street that he asks, “Are you going to bother telling me what we’re doing?” 

She doesn’t pause. “I want to check something.”

“And you need me with you because…?”

She doesn’t break stride or even turn to look at him. He sighs inwardly and follows her, pulling out Stiles’ house keys. 

When he opens the door, it already feels like a mausoleum; John hasn’t slept here in nights, staying in the McCalls’ spare room (or perhaps not the _spare_ room, but Scott and Isaac haven’t brought it up, so neither does Derek). Afternoon sun through the window highlights the dust spiraling from Stiles’ blankets on the floor. 

Lydia’s already heading upstairs, so he closes the front door and follows her to Stiles’ room. 

The space looks like it was hit by a tornado, but for once, it’s not Stiles’ fault. Derek’s books are still strewn across the room where he and Allison threw them aside when they finished with them. The cactus at the window looks fine, but the spider plant’s edges have browned. The crookneck squash and tiny pumpkin mold next to it. 

“What did you want to—“ _look at,_ he starts to ask, but he sees Stiles’ wall and knows the answer.

Next to the columns of numbers, Lydia’s written out the sentences he and Allison translated weeks ago, her large, neat letters contrasting with Stiles’ scribbles. 

“I’ve been thinking about this for—well, weeks, really, and it’s only a conjecture”—he hears the implied _but my conjectures are_ rarely _wrong_ in her tone—“But I _think,_ even though we thought this was like, jumbled garbage, that he _did_ write out messages for us. This one, for instance, is for me.”

She points to a line that starts _split in dreams, together in woods._ “And this is yours.” She points to another line. He means to ask her what the hell led her to this conclusion and _why the fuck_ she hasn’t mentioned it before, but his eyes skip to the line beneath the first one she indicated, and his heart drops out of his chest. 

_Take care of yourself._

He thinks she's saying something, but he can't process it and cuts her off. “He said that to me."

“What?“ 

“Not what you said, the line below it. _‘Take care of yourself.’_ That’s the last thing he said to me. Last night.”

She makes an impatient noise. “So?”

“ _'Has your sister already left? I told her she should wait for you,’_ ” he reads. “The first line he wrote. The last thing my mom said to me. And two down, this one about mountains—it has to be the last thing Boyd’s sister said to him. What he said to me is two down from that.” 

“But two down from _that_ is about the witches. It was the only one we could figure out.”

He scans the line she’s talking about— _who are you? I don’t know you. Leave, get out, someone help_ —and shakes his head. “We were wrong.”

“Then explain it.” 

He doesn’t know what he’s going to say before he says it. When the words materialize, they taste like smoke, and he nearly gags. “It’s the last thing Stiles’ mom said to him before she died.” 

And that’s it, that’s the gruesome puzzle finally assembled. Half the lines on this wall are nothing more than memorials to the dead, and it hits him like it didn’t before: _take care of yourself,_ the last words he’d ever hear him shape, and that it’s a directive he can’t even follow, wouldn’t know where to start, makes it even more bitter.

But Lydia’s eyes glint. “I think,” she says, “you just proved my theory.”

The spaces between his ribs are raw as a fresh wound and his throat’s too dry to speak, so he raises his eyebrows. 

She says, “I think you can use his power. I think you just _did._ ”

His eyebrows are so high that it shouldn’t be possible for them to climb, but they do. She sighs and grabs his wrist, flipping it over. He’s forgotten about the scar, but it’s still there, rippled and moon-white. 

She asks, “How did you feel when the nogitsune tried to kill you in the clearing?”

He doesn’t know what he expected her to ask, but it wasn’t that, so he blinks at her. She narrows her eyebrows, tightening her grip on his wrist, and he tries to think, not flinching from the memory. It was like burning to death from the inside out, he remembers, like a white-hot snake was burrowing through his veins to crack his bones, like…

“Like my blood was boiling,” he finally says, and she releases his arm. She gestures at the wall, looking oddly triumphant, at the line she originally pointed out to Derek that he didn’t read. It says _find the secret in the blood._ When Derek’s expression doesn’t change, she clucks her tongue testily and says, “He didn’t only give you a piece of his soul, idiot. He gave you his power so you can use it.”

“That’s not what he said last night,” Derek says. _Once I’m dead, once it’s dead, it’ll disappear. You’ll be okay again._ Like it was an ember he could fizzle out but not fan. 

“Yes, but this is what he knew weeks ago but couldn’t explain because of Deaton’s spell. He might not even remember writing this, but consciously or not, he knew that giving it to you meant that if you figured out how, you could save him.”

 _Save him._ The sounds don’t make sense, the words lack meaning. Stiles can't be saved. Neither can Derek. 

“Figure _what_ out?” 

She grabs his wrist again, and this time when she bites into it with her fingernails, it hurts, but not only on the surface of his skin. She presses, and it hurts deeper. Near his bones. Near his soul, the pain and hurt and longing that pulled him out of bed each night and tried to throw the words _let me come home_ out of his chest, over the phone, before he buried them in his throat.

He flinches without meaning to and she presses harder, meeting his glare with her own steely look, and he feels it, deeper still.

Something that scares him. Something that hurts, that could sear, could burn…if he let it. If he knew how to let it. 

“If you can figure out the message he left you, you can save him. If you can’t figure it out,” Lydia says, green eyes locked on his, “when he dies, he stays dead.” 

_It’s fire, Der, it’ll hurt you,_ and Derek had believed him and said yes anyway, said he was ready and meant it, but that was hours ago when he was facing the prospect of sheltering Stiles’ soul until the end, not _using_ it like the nogitsune has. He doesn’t understand what she means, doesn’t understand how she knows or what, exactly, she’s asking him to do. Frustration and, worse, a bewildered hope well up inside him. _Save him,_ he thinks, scathing, _meaningless, we—_

 _Breathe,_ says a voice in his head, and it’s his wolf. _Breathe if you don’t want to see him damned._

He gives Lydia one last glare. She glares back. And then he breathes. He imagines it as the sound of the ocean pooled in the shells of his ears. He closes his eyes and sees not red or orange but a searing purple, deeper than cobalt in a fire’s heart. The scar on his wrist aches and throbs and brings back the nights he spent dreaming with Stiles in the forest and reading Spanish poetry to him til dawn, each syllable a lick of flame on his tongue, in his ears, and he reaches deep, deeper, until he finds the secret—finds the fire—in his blood. 

The bottom drops out of the world and he falls into heat so all consuming he can’t breathe. Fire transmutes each cell into a funeral pyre. But it’s only for a moment, because it’s not just fire, it’s not just power, it’s _Stiles._ As he realizes it erupts with clarity so fierce he feels himself transformed into oxygen consumed by fire, burnt into another element entirely. 

He doesn’t notice when she leaves, too focused on fire swelling from vein to bone, bone to muscle, muscle to tendon to ligament to skin. When the fire recalls the scent of his family’s burnt bones, he breathes until the fire of Stiles’ touch is the only thing he feels, his crackling breath all he hears. Derek sinks into it. He loses himself. 

When he opens his eyes again, it’s dark. He waits for his hands to stop shaking, and then he grabs his phone.

 _I can do it,_ he texts Lydia. _Tell the others._

Her reply is almost instantaneous. _Are you sure?_

_I’m sure._

_When?_

He looks at the window, lets the wolf gauge its strength by the moon out of sight, just beneath the horizon. _Now,_ it whispers to him. 

_Now,_ he tells her. _I’m ready now._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ~insert apologies, also lots of love and admiration for you all~
> 
> song for this chapter: ghost of the mountain, tired pony


	20. Chapter 20

Derek studies Noshiko’s back, the leaves that brush her shoulders as she strides down the dark forest path in front of him, and replays Lydia’s words from their drive up.

_The way it felt when he almost killed us? That’s what you need to mimic._

She isn’t Noshiko, not really, but Kira’s shape shifting is so spot-on after a century of practice that Derek nearly attacked her in Scott’s entryway an hour earlier. If Allison hadn’t stepped between them, hands raised, he wouldn’t have noticed the self-conscious, anxious smile on Noshiko’s—Kira’s—face that stopped him from trying to rip her apart.

 _Use his power to gather enough of the body’s energy—his_ soul— _in one point in the body, enough to break bones, but don’t. Break. Them. Instead of forcing the power in, pull it out._

Allison and Chris murmur to each other behind Derek, counting bullets and checking clips. John’s footsteps at the back of the line are the heaviest, body tugged along by his son’s presence ahead and Melissa’s fingers wound through his. The wolves pad silently between their feet. When Scott’s small wolf brushes Derek’s leg, warmth breathes through him, feather-soft. Scott trots ahead, taking the brief respite with him.

_It shouldn’t be as hard as you think it is. You have the missing part of his soul—you just need to gather the rest. Souls want to be whole. It should pull towards you._

_And if it doesn’t?_

Derek’s fingers twitch, and he fights not to curl them into fists—he doesn’t want the others to know the power Stiles gave him has either recognized that its body is close or that it doesn’t truly belong to Derek. The confidence he felt in Stiles’ room is fast abandoning him, and the fire licking his veins doesn’t help. 

_If you break him, I can’t put him back together. Do you understand me? You have to control it enough to pull out his soul without wrecking his body._

The path weaves around a copse of trees and then opens to reveal a single tree. _The_ tree, although _tree_ has never felt like the right word to him. The Nematon is all predator, oozing a thirst for pain that outrivals even the nogitsune’s. It would slash them in half with its long branches and lick up their blood if it could. 

The energy that flows from it—so similar to the creeping darkness Derek felt from the nogitsune—makes Derek sure Boyd was right to suggest they come here to spring their plan. Even if the nogitsune divested itself of physical pain by pinning it on Stiles’ soul, its body’s state would curtail its movement. Hopefully, that means it would stay near a familiar, energizing source. Near enough that Kira’s foxfire calls it quickly. Derek doesn’t have much time, and neither does Stiles. 

The pack filters through the trees and fills the space near the Nematon. Wolves press noses to the ground, humans continue to check rounds and clips and quivers, and Kira breathes blue flame to life in her palm. 

Stiles’ cozy fire murmurs _light your way, light your way,_ but Kira’s foxfire reminds Derek of a magician’s sleight of hand, flickering in and out of reality as it whispers _look this way, look this way._ It flutters from her hand and hovers above a bush off the path. She blows a second into being, then another, sending them further and further ahead until they form a path stretching out of sight. 

“How long until we know it’s following them?” Melissa says quietly. She shoots a glance at the tree as if worried it can overhear.

“Not long, if it’s close,” Allison answers. “It should want to come to us, anyway. As soon as it sees the foxfire, it—“

Kira flinches, stung by something they can’t see. The movement looks strange rippling down Noshiko’s typically soldier-stern body. “Oh, gosh. It was closer than I thought. It’s coming.”

John’s head jerks up. Scott growls and nods towards the trees, corralling them back. As they retreat into the gloom, Lydia looks at Derek a last time. He holds her gaze but has no idea what she sees reflected back at her in his eyes.

Overshadowed by the Nematon, Kira, even masked as Noshiko, looks frail. The blue light washes her skin in an eerie, icy glow. Although there’s no wind, the Nematon creaks. Behind him, Isaac chuffs nervously. Scott presses against him, and he quiets. 

A hard step on the grass, dozens of feet away, and then something drags along the dirt. The wolves’ ears prick forward. Another step, another drag. Finally, the nogitsune limps into sight, and if Derek’s wolf weren’t anchoring his body to the ground, he’d fall to his knees.

Stiles’ mouth is a dark gash cutting his skin. The bruises painted down his arms are black holes marring constellations of freckles. The nogitsune presses a hand to the Nematon; even so, it sways and nearly falls. 

If they weren’t here to kill it, that body would take care of the task well enough within a few days. 

“Noshiko,” the nogitsune says, inclining Stiles’ head. A dark and wild elation unfurls from its chest and winds through the clearing. Beside Derek, Melissa shivers. 

“Nogitsune.” Kira nods back and continues in Japanese. The nogitsune barks a laugh before responding in the same language. 

None of the pack members understand what the foxes are saying, but it doesn’t matter; they know the plan. And when Kira raises her hands to her neck, Derek knows it’s working.

 _This is the shittiest plan we’ve ever had,_ Derek thinks grimly as Kira unties the knot at the back of her choker. The pearl at the center dims, but her hands don’t shake when she holds the necklace out. 

The nogitsune pushes away from the tree. It staggers toward her, drunk on greed, taking the bait: Kira, posing as Noshiko, surrendering, exchanging her soul for a promise that when the nogitsune swallows the rest of the world, it won’t kill her daughter. 

It was the best trick they could think of to draw the nogitsune near and distract it long enough for the wolves to attack quickly, giving Derek and Lydia time to act. The nogitsune steps forward and Kira inches back, luring it closer to the tree line where the others hide, and god _damn_ but it’s a shitty. Fucking. Plan. 

The creature stops. Its knife’s blade of a smile widens, foxfire gouging hollows into Stiles’ cheeks. It leers at Kira and gestures for her to approach. Her cheeks flush at whatever it says, but she steps forward and ties the ribbon around Stiles’ neck.

Out of the corner of his eye, Lydia tenses. A few more seconds, and then… 

“Thank you,” says the nogitsune. “I need my hands for this next part.”

Kira freezes. Scott’s surprise and then anger ripple through Derek. “What…what are you…” Kira starts.

“What am I doing?” It pinches thumb and forefinger together to draw a slim line in the air, dropping a piece of darkness into Stiles’ hands. Derek recognizes the motion from the fight in the forest. “I’m surprised at you, _Noshiko.”_

Before Derek can yell out at Kira to duck, run, do anything to save herself, the fox snaps the blade. Blood spills from the deep cut it reopens in Stiles’ palms, but the creature doesn’t disappear like it did the last time it broke a knife like that. It doesn’t suddenly charge at Kira or crush the pearl in the hollow of Stiles’ throat. In fact, the creature doesn’t move at all.

Instead, as the blade shatters, a large bundle appears at the nogitsune’s feet. 

The bundle has a vaguely human shape. It groans. It tries to push itself up with its elbows but sags back down. Derek gets a whiff of blood, ozone, and a spice he can’t quite place… 

His heart stops. 

“I have a question,” the nogitsune says as a sob chokes itself from Kira’s mouth. She stumbles to her knees, reaching for her mother. Noshiko’s form slides off of her like water.

 _“Okaasan,”_ Kira says, less like a word and more like the sound she’d make if stabbed through the ribs. Then, _“mama,”_ a plea that turns to a scream as the nogitsune steps forward and grinds her hand into the dirt. 

“I asked myself, how is it I could follow foxfire—Noshiko’s foxfire—into a clearing, speak with her, and make a deal to spare her daughter’s life, when I’d had the same conversation with her not an hour ago?” It presses harder with its foot and Kira’s screams rise; there’s a sound like chalk snapping.

Noshiko spits out a few words in Japanese, but they sound thick, like her mouth is full of cotton. Or blood. 

“Oh, I won’t kill her in front of you quite yet,” the nogitsune says. The darkness in its eyes deepens. “First, I want to deal with my mage’s reckless pack and the embarrassingly naïve plan they drew up with your daughter. I owe that much to my mage, at least; a promise to strip one’s family members’ flesh from skin is a terrible one to break.”

“Please, don’t—“ 

Kira’s words break off with another scream as the nogitsune stamps. “Oh, god,” Allison murmurs.

“Scotty,” the creature calls, slipping smoothly into Stiles’ cadence. It whistles like it’s calling a dog. “Time to come out and play.” 

John barks, “Scott, no,” but Scott growls, bares his teeth, sprints into the rippling blue light. The other wolves follow. Chris swears and cocks his handgun, and Allison strings an arrow through her bow with a movement faster than Derek can follow. 

The nogitsune steps back to kick Kira in the head. She drops. Noshiko yells. The creature snaps its head back with a wild scream of laughter and steps to meet the wolves, dark eyes filling and then overflowing with black ink that drips down Stiles’ cheeks, collecting in his collarbones like so much rain. 

“Derek, _now,”_ Lydia yells, but it’s over without beginning: the nogitsune may not have Stiles’ fire anymore, but it can still grab Scott without touching him, fling him twenty feet back against a tree; Scott’s spine cracks against the pine and he crumples. Chris fires a shot, but the nogitsune flings up a hand and repels it back at him. The bullet lodges in Chris’s thigh, and he hits the ground with a grunt of pain. Melissa starts to run for him and John pulls out a gun to cover her. The nogitsune turns toward him, grin spreading.

“Derek!” Lydia screams again, and it doesn’t matter that it’s over, he doesn’t care, he moves. 

Allison sends a firestorm of arrows after him as cover. The nogitsune knocks them aside without turning its head to look, but none of them lodge in Derek’s skin. He only needs to get close enough that the fire in can swell towards the trapped soul inside that battered body. The closer he gets, the higher it rises, a molten tide flowing in.

Later, they’ll tell him it was seconds, not an age. But for him, the twining of their two flames spans hours, days. Derek’s vision flickers in and out, blackened by spurts of pain. He turns to a sheet of fire and surges with the sudden awareness of bright bodies, souls ablaze, strung through the clearing. Strongest of all is the fiery spirit in that extraordinary body across from him, even pinned under a shadowy weight.

 _Gather the energy,_ Lydia told him, so he does. He pries the small flames at Stiles’ core from his cells, shepherds it through the stream of his blood to pool in the tender spots between bone where Derek can pluck it out like a rose from a thicket. 

It hurts like nothing has before. Not like finding Laura’s body or looking into the scythe of Kate’s sharp smile or watching Stiles fade to mist last night. It’s his nerves hacked into with a dull blade, his blood turning to steam trying to contain it, whatever it is. No wonder it had spilled into Derek’s dreams and imprinted itself on his skin while Stiles carried it—surely no one could hold this without combusting like Derek feels half a second from doing. But Stiles hadn’t. He’d dreamed himself a vast forest and drawn Derek along with him.

Now, their roles reverse. Derek wields all the pull, trying to gather Stiles’ expansive soul and reel it towards him like the moon dragging in the tide, but the fire shatters him and turns him to smoke again and again. He has no idea what’s happening around him—wolves snarling, flashes of light and contorting branches when vision blares through him, a sound of someone—Stiles?—gurgling, choking on their own blood. 

His body seizes as another lick of fire sears him, and then, without warning, the timbers of his mind collapse. They become the cabin’s flame-licked beams cracking, falling, trapping limp bodies below, cutting off his brothers’ screams. Only it’s not the cabin’s roof crumbling, it’s one of Stiles’ ribs bending like a sapling and snapping from the heat of Derek’s power, and it’s not his brother screaming but Stiles—no, the nogitsune—no, Lydia—no—

 _It’s not working._

He collides against the thought, and it stuns him with the force of a stone wall.

_I can’t do this._

Lydia’s screams reach a fever pitch. The wolves whine and cry and bark and claw at their ears. He hears Melissa’s breath hitch and Chris swallow a groan and Allison nock another arrow, unsure of where to point it, and then, through the cacophony, he hears something soft and broken.

_Son. Please._

It’s John. Derek tastes his sick yellow panic, but there’s something more. Gleaming and silver. Sturdy like a house. Warm like arms you can collapse into at the end of a day when you’re small and everything’s awful. 

_Son, please,_ but he isn’t talking to Stiles. 

_Son,_ and in the word, he hears his mother’s voice, blue as a river.

It splits him open. Cleaves him in two with the ferocious crack of an iceberg calving. The smoke clears.

Stiles _is_ fire. The spark, Spark, undying ember spinning Derek’s stone heart to weightlessness. The dry, hot wind that sucks the air from his lungs every time Stiles walks into a room. Crackling energy that feeds the pack and burns trees only to transmute them into another element, to ripen the earth for something newer, greener. He’s burning out and he’s still beautiful, smoke whorling from a blown-out wick into lines that make the air sigh.

Derek isn’t fire. Even before Kate, he wasn’t yellow optimism and orange energy like Cora and Laura but quiet blue calm, the one who preferred pressing silent messages like leaves between pages of books to speaking. He’s the still, depthless pool reflected at him from his mother’s blue eyes. He’s the wolf in winter watching a frozen river, ears pricked to the cobalt water rushing under the snow and the life still beating there. 

Derek isn’t fire. Derek is _ice._

Another snapping branch, a second rib. Melissa screams. Derek thinks river. He thinks calm. He thinks Stiles reborn from ice. He thinks quicksilver paws and olive-colored trees and pine needles soft underfoot, wind tossing the branches like waves. He thinks ice, and Stiles’ fire in him hisses, steams, and pulls away. Just enough.

_Stiles. Come here._

He thinks ice cooling bruises, thinks heat from twined bodies. He blends the two to something new, something all his own. He doesn’t pull. He calls. 

_Stiles, it’s time._

The fire-bright soul flickers fast as hummingbird wings. 

_Sweetheart. Let go._

The soul shines and shines. And then it goes out.

The thrumming spark and blistering heat disappear from Derek’s body, dying as immediately as fire deprived of oxygen. Derek lands hard on his knees and Stiles’ body mimics the movement but doesn’t catch itself before it slams into the ground.

Derek’s world stops.

A shadow peels itself away from Stiles’ body and up off the ground, clinging to the tree, and time speeds up. The shadow’s mouth gapes wide and groans like a creaking door. Dark rivulets stream from its head to form mangled, limb-like shapes. Wolves snarl and sprint. Guns fire. Arrows streak towards the shape and pin it to the tree, drawing a tarry substance from the bark. 

Derek pushes himself up, ignores everything but Lydia, and grabs for her hand as she reaches for his. She pulls him forward and then yanks him down beside her, beside the body. She tugs Stiles’ head into her lap and presses her free hand to his neck. She grips Derek’s hand tighter and he grips back, making himself the tether to life her necromancy requires, and she begins.

A howling wind—the shadow-nogitsune’s screams—whips through him as Lydia’s eyes roll back. She speaks in a language he sees more than he hears, as if runes and symbols spill out her mouth rather than sounds. They call to him, make something dark inside him curl in his throat until he chokes. His wolf snarls and bites it back. 

Her deadening hand is cold enough to peel his skin from muscle. He bites his lip to keep from hissing and focuses on Stiles’ half-open eyes, on the droplets of ink beaded on his eyelashes, on his pupils expanded to let in light Stiles can’t see. Lydia’s hand is tinged blue against Stiles’ skin, and Stiles lies broken on his side, and he doesn’t breathe and doesn’t breathe and doesn’t breathe.

Lydia’s body is a dead star absorbing matter. Her eyebrows draw together in a stern line. Something hovers just above them, warm and small and fragile as a bird caught in the twisted net of Lydia’s runes. 

A rushing noise like a curtain rippling or a bird swooping flows past him. Lydia drops Derek’s hand, but the body on the ground looks the same. No flushed cheeks, no breath, no heartbeat. 

“Goddamn stubborn fucking _asshole,”_ Derek snarls, reaching for Stiles to shake him, yell at him, breathe for him, do something— _anything_ —to force him back to life—and then Stiles gasps a breath and immediately starts to choke.

“Jesus,” Derek says. Lydia holds his head against her and Derek holds his shoulder to keep him from writhing as he gags and hacks up the blood in his mouth and throat, spilling it across them both. Lydia runs shaking fingers through Stiles’ hair, soothing him or herself. Derek shifts closer to her while maintaining a firm enough grip on Stiles to stop the worst of his thrashing.

Stiles sags, wheezing. Somewhere behind Derek, steel clangs against steel.

“You fucking asshole,” Lydia says. “Don’t you _ever_ fucking terrify me like that again.” 

Stiles makes a noise that might be a faint huff of laughter. Derek’s heart jumps. “Jesus, Lyds,” Stiles whispers, ragged. “You never swear this much.”

“You’re a fucking horrible influence,” Derek tells him, and Stiles looks at him, and Stiles reaches for him and winds his hands around the back of Derek’s neck, and Derek pulls him up and gathers him close, and he leans into Stiles and simply breathes. Stiles’ warm breath flutters against his neck.

A triumphant shriek rips the earth. A wolf snarls and then yelps, body flung and slammed into the dirt, and Stiles looks up.

“Scott?” he breathes. Then, _“Dad?”_

“Stiles—“

He’s too late. Stiles has slipped through his arms like smoke, though Derek didn’t let him go. He moves as if his ribs aren’t broken and his side is whole and he didn’t come back to life five fucking seconds ago. He moves like fire, and his feet are nowhere near the ground.

Kira’s standing above her mother’s prone form, blood dripping from her head but her sword out and steady. The nogitsune swings at her with formless black limbs that aren’t a color so much as a complete lack of light, a hole in the world’s fabric. The sheriff’s left arm is clapped to his right, covering a gunshot wound that leaks blood. He looks across the clearing, searching for Derek. Then he sees Stiles. 

Scott howls. 

The wolves—those still standing; Boyd is limp on the ground with Erica guarding him—turn towards the sound, and then join in. The gold hum breaks against Derek, overwhelming him with a heady rush of power and belonging that throw him to his feet. 

Melissa swallows a sob and John stumbles forward, but Stiles doesn’t seem to see or hear them. Instead, his raised hands swell with purple fire. 

The nogitsune’s true voice is an empty hiss. “Mage, you _dare—“_

Stiles makes a twisting motion with one fiery hand, and the nogitsune shrieks.

“Shouldn’t have let me into your head, motherfucker. Shouldn’t have given me a taste of your soul just so you could taste _mine.”_

It's Stiles' voice and it's not. It's fire and blood and pain, and Derek doesn't let himself recoil. The creature stumbles away from the tree and Stiles twists again. 

“Shouldn’t have shown me what you actually are, shouldn’t have used me—“

The shadow ripples, like it’s boiling from the inside out. Its tendrils break apart, swirl back into it, slide off again like the creature can’t hold itself together.

“Shouldn’t have fucked with the McCall pack, you _bitch_ , and no one is _ever—going—to hurt us—again—“_

Each pause punctuated by another twist, another surge of heat from Stiles’ body, another scream from the nogitsune that goes on and on. Melissa screws up her face and claps her hands over her ears. Erica whines, burying her face in the dirt. Wolves turn away; humans cover their faces with their hands. Kira drops beside her mother and squeezes her eyes shut. 

Only three of them watch Stiles rend the thing apart. Three of them witness its agony, see it claw its hollow eyes. Three of them hear it beg. 

Only Lydia, Derek, and Scott watch Stiles trap its soul and wrench it into nonexistence. 

Its howls cuts off so abruptly Derek’s ears pop with the void it leaves behind. Smears of gray dust on the ground whirl in the heat from Stiles’ fire and disappear like they never existed.

John sinks to his knees as Stiles floats the few inches back to the ground. Scott steps toward him, but Stiles stays facing the tree, the fire in his hands refusing to die. When Scott takes another step Stiles flinches and raises his hands. Scott stills.

“Stiles,” Derek says, keeping his voice low and calm, and Stiles whips around. His eyes blaze, their heat so strong Derek should stagger back, but he holds his ground. 

Stiles blinks, and the light in his eyes flickers and clears. “Derek?” he whispers. 

The flame in his hands dies and his eyes roll back. For the second time that night, Stiles’ body goes limp.

This time, Derek’s there to catch him when he falls.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> song for this chapter: I'm Sending You Away, M83


	21. Chapter 21

A boy jogs through dreamed woods. His red hoodie guards against the bite of autumn in the air. His breath hovers in the air and lingers as he darts through it. 

An animal too big to be a dog lopes alongside him, leaves crunching beneath its paws. The wind stirs the leaves dying in bursts of gold and red above them. Bright patches of sun shiver through the branches, painting the dirt. 

The boy’s heartbeat, his footsteps hitting the ground, the sound of the wolf panting beside him fill his head and drown out his other thoughts. He lets them. 

_We can’t run like this forever,_ says the wolf beside the boy. _You have to come back to us soon, Stiles._

The boy knows. He keeps running.

He doesn’t run out of breath and he doesn’t slow down. He runs and runs and runs. The black wolf keeps pace. 

He runs until the dirt path is coated in the yellow and orange and red skeletons of dead leaves. He looks up at the trees’ branches, thick and dark, bare and ready for winter. His imagined sun sets in a brilliant shade of purple, the dreamy moon a thumbnail on the horizon.

The boy doesn’t notice he’s stopped running until the wolf says, _It’s time._

The boy in the red hoodie takes a deep, shaky breath. As soon as he agrees, he knows, a thousand aches will settle back into his bruised and broken bones. A slow and gnawing grief and guilt will bind him to the earth. He doesn’t know how long it will be until he shakes off the darkness and runs like this again. His courage disappears with the sun.

The wolf nuzzles his side, and the boy instinctively drops his hand in between its ears. The wolf rubs its head along his palm, and its cold, wet nose against his skin makes the boy smile. He drops his gaze to look at the wolf, meets its deep, warm eyes.

 _Stiles,_ says Derek’s wolf. _Wake up._

So he does.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> JUST ONE MORE AFTER THIS. AAAHHH. And then on to the NEXT STORY. Literally as always, I AM SO SORRY FOR BEING SO SLOW. THANK U FOR BEARING WITH ME, YOU BEAUTIFUL BEAUTIFUL BEEEAUUUTIFUL HUMANS. I AM SO SORRY. And so sorry that I apparently can only end on obnoxious cliffhangery things. FAIR WARNING: I bought a house (!!!!!!!) and need to move out of my apartment REAL FAST, so July is going to be a hectic month. Plus, I want the last chapter to be gooooooood. But I swear it will be up....some.....time.....sometime? I will never abandon you, I will be back as fast as I can to conclude this story. I love all of you so so much ;--;
> 
> song for this chapter: the woods, daughter


	22. Chapter 22

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey YOU! YES, YOU! I love you. <3

The first time he wakes up, his eyes are still too heavy to open. Machines hum to themselves. Voices like silver threads weave a warm blanket over him. His toes twitch against soft cotton wrapped tight around his feet, up his legs. He sinks back into sleep almost immediately, but instead of the dream forest, he falls into a peaceful darkness that covers him like a quilt, his awareness of their voices never leaving him.

The second time, names gently press themselves to faces. That’s his dad next to him, slumped in a chair and resting his head beside Stiles’ pillow, his breaths deep and even. Melissa leans over and presses a hand to Stiles’ forehead, smoothing back his hair and whispering, “Hey, kiddo.” He picks out Lydia in the background snapping something at Erica, who snorts in return. Boyd’s deep voice rumbles in the hallway, Scott’s response calm and steady. He thinks he hears Allison’s soft laugh and Kira’s self-conscious giggle from the far side of the hospital room. Before the quilt throws itself back over him, he feels Derek’s hand at his wrist gently tapping to the rhythm of his pulse. 

The third time, he wakes to a combination of strings and horns he’d recognize anywhere. He blinks back into the world and zeroes in on the TV screen in the hospital room’s right-hand corner, where Darth Vader looms out of carbon-freezing fog and Luke, sweet precious boy that he is, leaps backward in such an ungainly fashion that Stiles winces for him.

Derek was right. Stiles is all Luke. If Derek were in the room, Stiles could whine to him about it, see what kind of expression the concession would scribble on Derek’s face, but the only person in the room is Scott staring open-mouthed at the screen, completely enraptured. 

“Seriously?” Stiles croaks. “You’re already on Empire? You watched A New Hope without me?”

Scott jumps so hard he nearly knocks his chair backwards. Stiles, who doesn’t remember the last time he got the upper hand on Scott’s superhuman senses, can’t stop himself from smirking. In return, Scott’s face breaks into the widest smile Stiles has ever seen. “Dude, this was the only thing on TV. Plus, Erica said it was the best one, so.” 

“Oh my god,” he rasps. “You didn’t. Scott, get back in here and tell me you aren’t watching the original trilogy for the first time out of order, I swear to god—“

Scott, who’s already halfway out the door, grabs the door and swings around to give Stiles an exaggeratedly devilish grin before he disappears. Stiles groans, tries to raise his hands to scrub them through his hair in exasperation, and quickly realizes three things: his stiff right hand is tethered to an IV while his left wrist is wrapped in a brace and itches with a thin tube that runs along his arm and disappears into his skin; he’s propped up in bed instead of lying flat; and, oh god, breathing really fucking hurts. His groan turns into a yelp that becomes a knife twisting through his lungs. 

“Stiles?”

John is stark white in the doorway, and for the briefest flash Stiles is in the clearing, clawing with bloody hands through a vortex of shadow and screaming his throat raw, his dad with a red line scrawled across his forehead like he’s marked for sacrifice. 

The next moment John’s crossed the room and folded Stiles into his arms. More shapes pour into the room behind him, blurry and smeared like watercolors, which is confusing until Stiles realizes he’s crying into his dad’s shoulder, cheek pressed to the soft flannel of his shirt. He holds on for dear life, like he had months ago whenever his dad woke him from another screaming nightmare, until the knives in his chest—god, are those his breaths? is this what _breathing_ feels like now?—stab hard enough that he— _fuck_ —can’t breathe. John lets him go but keeps a hand on Stiles’ shoulder as he scrambles for the next searing, shallow breath. 

“Don’t crowd him,” Melissa scolds, but they’re a pack, they _need_ this, and he’s still crying as the others press close, bringing back his air. The golden bond between them flares in his aching chest and forces something like a sob out of him because he thought he’d severed it the night he banished them from his head, thought he’d never feel the pack’s comforting tether again, but they’re here, they’ve always been, and as he drinks them in even _Erica_ is crying, is he sure this isn’t a dream?, but where’s—

Leaning against the doorway, hands tucked in his jacket pockets. Stubble on his cheeks and shadows under his eyes, which meet Stiles’ and knock the breath out of him with the weight of Spanish poetry and the sea between them, soul lifting out of him light at Derek’s touch, the wolf’s easy pace beside him in the autumn woods. Derek’s eyes reflect something like gratitude, something like reverence, something like wryness and shyness a thousand things Stiles can’t quite decipher, but oh, he will, he thinks, flushing with a quiet, sweet elation. He will.

The pack draws back from their tight circle around Stiles as Derek pushes off the doorframe with his shoulder to walk across the room. “About time,” he says gruffly. “I told you to wake up days ago.”

He’s so entranced by Derek’s dark blue eyes that he almost forgets to answer. “I don’t know if you noticed, but doing what I’m told isn’t exactly one of my strengths.” 

Derek settles himself on the bed, opposite John. “Mm,” he says. “Think I noticed.” He thumbs the last tear from Stiles’ unbroken cheekbone. They share a small, quiet smile, and for a moment, everyone else disappears from Stiles’ world.

“No, seriously,” Melissa says, and the two of them jump. “The nurse is telling all of you to shoo a few inches for just a couple seconds. Go on, scatter.” 

“What’s all this shit for?” Stiles says in his scratchy voice, gesturing vaguely at the machines and tubes Melissa’s fussing with. She adjusts a dial with one hand and absently runs the other through his hair. 

“Collapsed lungs caused by broken ribs,” Lydia says, and fuck it’s good to hear her voice, see the pinched, fond look of perpetual exasperation on her face belied by warm eyes. “Melissa had to decompress your lungs in the car. The chest tube should stay in for a few more days.”

“Shit,” Stiles rasps, not sure if he should be worried or relieved that he doesn’t remember. “When’d that happen?”

“You stopped breathing normally and started going into shock while we were in the middle of breaking every traffic law in the book to get you to the hospital,” Melissa says, frowning at something on his screen.

“The next time you rip an ancient evil demon to shreds, be less dramatic about it,” Derek says. “The way you fell sent your broken ribs through your lungs.” 

He means to say something sarcastic—maybe _hey, my ribs didn’t exactly break themselves, try for less manhandling next time you kill me_ —but his lungs hurt, not just with the pain of breathing but at the vulnerability in Derek’s stance, at the sudden memory of the last words that ghosted through him ( _sweetheart, it’s time,_ sweet and bitter and bloody and gentle all at once) before he let oblivion swallow him whole. 

Scott whines quietly, and he must read Melissa’s exasperated sigh as pained acquiescence because the pack rings the bed again. It’s enough to have them close, hear them talk, to look at each of them in turn: concerned wrinkles smoothing out on Boyd’s face; Isaac’s typically sarcastic eyebrows lowered, his expression approaching something like happiness; Allison’s bright eyes and Kira’s quiet smile. 

She gives them a few minutes to gab at him, the wolves pushing closest to brush his fingers with their own, or, like Scott, ruffle his hair, getting reaccustomed to his living, awakened scent. His dad and Derek hang back with an easy camaraderie between them that draws Stiles’ eyes, a puzzle he’s eager to solve.

“Alright, kids, that’s all the time you’ve got. I need a doctor to come in and check him out, but—” Melissa says, raising a hand at Scott’s protest, “you can come back in twenty minutes. Okay? Go get some coffee or something.”

“Ooh, coffee, bring me—“

“You are absolutely not allowed anywhere near coffee for the next week, Stiles. Scratch that; _weeks_.” 

“Oh, come on, I’m—“ 

“Stiles,” says his dad. Stiles sighs and grumbles and gives in by shutting up. John chuckles.

As Melissa chivvies all of them but John out of the room, Derek shoots him a last look. It lies somewhere between raw and determined, wry and reverent, so overwhelming and dear that Stiles shivers.

God. He could live off that look for days. He uses its warmth to shore himself up against his doctor, who turns out to be an absolute sadist. 

“How often do I have to do this?” he asks after trying to force out enough air to count as the cough she made him take. The miserable half-breath leaves him wrung out with fresh pain. 

“Punctured lungs place you at a highly elevated risk of pneumonia,” she says briskly, “and as your body can’t stand another infection, we’ll have you cough every hour as a precaution. That wasn’t deep enough; try again.” 

He finally succeeds to his doctor’s satisfaction with his dad’s hand pressed to his back and Melissa holding one of his hands. He nearly passes out, it hurts so bad, but once the threatening darkness ebbs from the corners of his eyes, he asks, “Can I lie down yet?”

The sadist doctor shakes her head without looking away from the computer where she’s typing notes. “Pneumonia risk. We’ll take the chest tube out tomorrow, then give it another day before you can lie down a few hours at a time.”

He looks pleadingly at his dad, who continues to rub soft circles on his back and shrugs apologetically.

“They’ll need to change your bandage soon, too,” Melissa tells Stiles. “Luckily for you, that’ll hurt a hell of a lot less than this, and it’s only once a day instead of once an hour like the coughing.”

Every hour. His chest tightens. Melissa squeezes his hand and he squeezes back reflexively. 

When the horrible monster doctor finally leaves, Stiles wants to do nothing so much as lie down and cry. But then there’s a quiet knock on the door instead of the sudden clamor that should herald the pack’s return. 

The sound makes sense once Derek edges into the room, a cup of coffee in one hand and a tentative expression on his face. He’s the mirror image of the way he looked on Stiles’ front porch months ago, balancing boxes of books and plants, although the circles under his eyes are deeper and his face is scruffy with the stubble of long hospital nights. 

“Coffee?” Melissa says to John over Stiles’ head.

“Coffee,” John agrees. 

Derek raises his free hand to scrub it self-consciously through his hair. “Uh, sir, you don’t have to—“

“It’s John, son. And trust me, I do.”

Stiles doesn’t miss the way Derek’s eyes soften at the word “son,” or the smile on his dad’s face as he claps Derek’s shoulder. John points back at Stiles and says, “Behave.” Stiles gives him his most wide-eyed, innocent look, and John rolls his eyes. 

He and Melissa leave the room holding hands, and if Derek weren’t standing in front of him with flushed cheeks and a tiny Styrofoam cup, it would be the cutest thing Stiles has ever seen. They shut the door behind them. 

Stiles tries to make grabby hands at the cup of coffee with his stiff fingers, and Derek smirks.

“This is emphatically not for you.”

“Well it’s not for _you,_ ” Stiles says. “You hate it.”

“It’s for ambiance,” Derek says, walking across the room, settling into the chair next to Stiles’ bed, and placing the cup on the side table, just out of Stiles’ IV-tethered reach. 

Stiles feels a sudden a twitch of nervousness in his stomach. There’s no rulebook for being alone for the first time in a hospital room with your werewolf boyfriend who both killed you and helped raise you from the dead in the last week. Maybe he’s about to do everything all wrong, maybe he’s going to— 

“I didn’t sign up for a silent boyfriend,” Derek says. 

Surprised, Stiles snorts. “Well, I didn’t sign up for one who says something, like, mildly joke-adjacent out of nowhere, you can’t just spring that on a guy out of the blue, Derek.”

Derek leans back in the chair and raises his eyebrows. “I guess we’re both doomed to relationship disappointment.”

 _Boyfriend. Relationship._ He’s so light he could float out the window. 

“Hi,” Stiles says. 

“Hi yourself,” Derek answers.

Stiles twitches the achy fingers of his braced hand, and Derek winds his fingers through them as best he can.

“I missed you,” Derek says, skimming Stiles’ knuckles with his thumb.

“Missed you too,” Stiles says.

The coffee cools on the table as they talk. About lots of things—Deaton and Cora, Luisa and Morrell, blood magic and imaginary sage and hands wound tight through fur. But the words and the memories they conjure aren’t as important as Derek’s fingers twined through his, the comforting smell of coffee. 

When a nurse comes in to make him cough again, Derek glares when she looks like she’s going to say something about their interlaced hands. Instead of making Derek move, she purses her lips as she puts a hand to Stiles’ back, telling him to breathe in as deeply as he can. She can probably see Stiles’ knuckles turn white as his fingernails dig in to Derek’s palm, but she can’t see the black trails climbing Derek’s arms under his soft long-sleeved Henley, absorbing Stiles’ pain a little at a time. 

The second the nurse leaves the room, Stiles’ eyes start to droop shut against his will. God, he’s tired. “Stay with me?” he murmurs. 

“Don’t ask stupid questions,” Derek says, and the last thing Stiles feels before sleep takes him is the gentle kiss Derek presses to his forehead.

 

The hospital pumps him full of antibiotics that fight the infection from the bloody cloth and dirt and debris that festered for days in the gunshot wound. But the fever is a virus, and he’s too weak to shake it off. It settles in his bones and smears colors, obscures details, bullies him into a state of endless, restless half-sleep punctuated by nurses prodding him every few hours to make him cough or turn or breathe.

Once, he wakes to the rattle of china on wood and opens his eyes to Kira setting a steaming cup on the bedside table. She smiles at him apologetically and whispers, “Um, my mom made you some healing tea. It’s spelled to stay warm until you drink it.” 

He blinks blearily, trying to resolve her face into a solid shape and make sense of her words. “She could have killed me,” he murmurs, “when she traded herself for you. I saw her eyes. She could have. But instead she let it torture her for hours and…”

When she raises her hand he thinks for one confused moment that she’s going to cover his mouth. Instead, she rests it against his uninjured cheek, then bends down to press a kiss to his temple, the mantle of her two hundred years turning the simple movement to absolution.

One night he flails his way out of a nightmare gasping on breaths he can’t take, trying to scream in pain but only swallowing enough air to wheeze. He hears Scott say, “Dude, hang on, I’ll get him.” A nurse rushes in to press something cool into his IV, but it’s his dad running into the room that slows Stiles’ frantic breathing. John rocks him back and forth until he exhausts his sobbing and stumbles into sleep again.

Sometimes he wakes up to the entire pack huddled around the room—Erica curled up at the foot of his bed, Boyd with his feet propped up on Isaac’s chair, Derek perched on the doctor’s swivel stool, and Lydia in the corner surrounded by textbooks, pen in hand, doing everyone’s homework with one eye on the TV where Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu kick ass and take names. 

Other times he wakes to no one in the room but Derek, who’s sitting in the chair next to the bed utterly absorbed in a book. Sometimes Stiles just stares at him, enjoying the way the fever exaggerates his bright blue eyes and paints pink and purple splotches on Derek’s cheeks until sleep drags him back down. Sometimes Derek reaches out a hand without taking his eyes off his book and Stiles takes it. Sometimes, when Stiles wakes up flushed and shivery from fever dreams, Derek puts his book down, picks up Stiles’ hand, and quietly tastes each of his fingertips.

He gauges time by how the pile of books Derek finishes and stacks next to his bed grows. They’re the same ones he left for Stiles all those months ago—The Prisoner of Azkaban, the Borges collection, a slim book of Neruda odes in translation, James and the Giant Peach. Stiles remembers flipping through each book in the dark, calculating numbers and plucking meaning in a last frantic attempt to make something stick, make himself see and be seen, but it’s as though it happened to someone else. Those weren’t his bony fingers scrambling towards remembrance, not his heart racing against an ending he knew was coming but couldn’t describe, not his skin turning to ice and making every movement and thought jagged and pained. 

Deaton saved his life. He knows that. But he’s never going to forget the way it felt to scream without anyone hearing, to form the words that would wound Derek the most— _please don’t come home_ —over and over with his numb tongue.

Thanksgiving comes and goes. They spend it as a pack, as family, Melissa and John and Chris and Kira and Lydia and Allison and the wolves all crowded into Stiles’ increasingly tiny room. He sleeps through most of their makeshift celebration, wakes up intermittently and grouchily, but Derek’s rolling eyes and Scott’s enthusiasm and the few bites of Boyd’s heavenly mashed potatoes he can manage cheer him up.

Oddest of all, Noshiko swings by, keeping her distance from John, who does the same to her. She whispers something in her daughter’s ear, presses a hot mug into her hand, kisses the top of her head. She gives Stiles an appraising, almost thoughtful, _nearly_ respectful look before leaving. 

By the start of December, he can stand up and walk to the bathroom with help, though he only makes it back to bed shaking, covered in cold sweat, breathing hard enough for his lungs to protest. 

“And we’re paying for this how, exactly?” he frets at his dad as the fever stays and festers. The stack of Derek’s finished books on the bedside table has grown to ten. 

“Stiles, there’s no way everyone but you knows your boyfriend’s sitting on a pile of buried gold or whatever the hell—“ 

“Bearer bonds, Dad, not gold, come on. They’re not, like, pirates.”

“Plus,” his father adds, ignoring him, “the fever’s down enough that they’ve just about cleared you for release. Wait it out a few more days and you’ll be home before Christmas, kiddo.”

Something about that thought— _home_ —sets his heart fluttering like a bird, and not in a good way. 

As the pain in his chest settles, he has the energy, though not necessarily the inclination, to catalogue his scars, psychic or otherwise. It’s better to hold Derek’s hands than consider how his wrist aches when he sleeps on his side, or how he can’t move the last two fingers on his left hand and the third is hard to bend, knife-severed tendons that won’t ever heal. He’d rather watch A New Hope with Scott on his laptop and enjoy Scott’s explosively gleeful reactions to every one of Han and Leia’s lines than run his fingertip along his broken cheekbone, mostly healed but still deeply bruised and darkened by the blood only just starting to drain from his eye sockets. And he’d definitely rather play Pokémon Gold on Erica’s old Nintendo DS while she plays Metroid on her even older Game Boy Advance than think about the way the nogitsune’s breath skimmed his lips like a kiss the moment before it pressed its soul to his and made them one.

A few days into December, Derek’s doing a crossword in a chair by Stiles’ bed when he says, without looking up, “What color do you want your room?”

Stiles blinks up from his phone. “Huh?”

“Lydia can erase the numbers you wrote with a spell before you come home, but we can repaint it too if you want.”

Stiles tenses. Against the near-constant backdrop of their blood, his memory of waking to a circle of dark shapes who ripped him from bed, slammed his head against his desk, and dragged him away screaming has taken a backseat in his brain. But it’s there, waiting for him to prod it to life in a dark moment. In his mind, his pale yellow bedroom walls shrink around him a bit. 

“Blue’s pretty,” he says. 

Derek pens another answer on his folded newspaper. “We’ll do it on Saturday. Lydia’s witch hazel should clear the fumes enough that you can come home Monday.”

That gives him five days, a firm deadline to reenter the world, having to finally meet it—well, not quite head-on, but slantwise. 

Derek senses his tension, looks up from his crossword and raises an eyebrow. “Can’t make out in a hospital room.”

“I submit that that’s only from lack of trying, dude, I mean, come on, there’s _endless_ space in here.”

“Stiles,” Derek says. “No one’s going to leave you there alone.” A pause. “I’m not going to leave you there alone.”

Stiles releases a shuddery breath. “Pale blue,” he finally says. “Don’t let Isaac make it, like, sarcastic.”

“It’d serve you right.”

He huffs. Derek huffs back. 

 

The December sky is too bright, and he hates the cold skimming his cheeks. The drive home feels interminable even though he knows it’s just ten minutes; he can feel every jolt of his dad’s car in his wrist, ribs, side, bruised head, the ache behind his eyes that he’s starting to feel will never go away. 

His dad helps him out of the car and up the front steps. His muscles are stiff from weeks of disuse, weak and wobbly from the mild fever that still hasn’t broken. 

John unlocks the door and swings it open with his free hand—Stiles is leaning heavily on the other arm—and the familiarity of home hits him all at once. Everything inside is the same as he remembers: same couch, same TV, same scent of coffee lingering from morning. 

Everything is the same, but everything is different, too. The pang in his chest has nothing to do with his tired lungs or the intercostal steroid shot they gave him just before he left the hospital. This is why he’d asked everyone else not to come—this feeling of everything tilting, just slightly, his home not his home in the same way it was. He thinks his chest might splinter, thinks he might curl up on the floor and try to fade away. 

“Stiles,” his dad says softly, and Stiles takes a breath. 

“Couch or bed?” John asks.

“Bed please,” Stiles says, and John helps him take one stair at a time up to his room.

The shade of blue they picked is the exact shade he wanted. Someone—Lydia? Allison?—painted little yellow flowers in the bottom left corner, interlacing them with a slim green line. The ache in his chest quiets a bit.

The simple walk from the car and up the stairs has worn him out completely. He needs his dad’s help to tug his old shirt over his head and pull on a fresh one. 

“Aren’t you sick of this?” Stiles asks, doing his best to force his arms into the sleeves. 

His dad doesn’t answer, but his hands tugging Stiles’ mother’s quilt around his shoulders and tucking it into place around him say _never._

He dreams the forest for the first time since he woke up the first time. Its silence freezes him in place. His breath hitches, heart suddenly clamoring to escape his bruised chest. 

Wind soughs through the trees, making them sigh. _Shh,_ they whisper, and the rising sounds of his own screams in his ears under the nogitsune’s knives fade a bit. 

_I can’t do this right now,_ he tries to tell them. _I don’t know if I can ever do this again, I’m sorry, I—_

Whispers sift from between their trunks. Voices from the past, present, future, voices of strangers or the people closest to him. They nudge him and he wants to follow, he does, but he’s shivering and the screams are getting harder to ignore and _not yet,_ he thinks, and the voices start to slip away. _I can’t yet._

The trees close around him, but they don’t feel threatening. _You’ll be back,_ they say, and let him go. 

 

He wakes with a start. Derek’s sitting in the desk chair texting, for once, instead of reading. Still, he looks somehow scholarly in the light from the desk lamp. It’s a shame Derek won’t ever need glasses; they’d highlight his ridiculous eyes perfectly, make them stand out even more. Not that Derek needs their help to look good; god, if he somehow got sexier Stiles doesn’t know how he’d— 

“They make fake ones if you’re that into it.” 

Stiles’ voice is still raspy from sleep, shaking from his dream. “Oh my god, I’m never going to be able to keep a secret around you, am I? This is so unfair, it’s not enough that you have superhuman werewolf senses, you also have to take advantage of how I accidentally talk without meaning to while you’re, like, mister silently sexy over there, all gorgeous and broody and—“

Derek’s rolling his eyes. He sets his phone on the side table and walks to the bed. He quirks an eyebrow at Stiles, as if asking permission. Stiles nods, and Derek slides under the covers next to him. With Derek’s arms around him, he finally stops shivering. 

“Hey,” Derek says. 

“Hey yourself,” Stiles says. They lie there in relative silence, Stiles trying to match his breath to Derek’s to even it out. 

Derek’s lips against his are softer than he remembers. They’re less frantic, more pliant when Stiles nudges them apart with his own. Derek’s hand rises to the base of Stiles’ neck, tracing circles that start his shivers again, albeit of a much more pleasant variety. 

When he pulls slightly to look Derek in the eye, Derek’s soft eyes are paired with a blazing, fierce look that makes Stiles flush from the top of his head to his toes. This time _his_ hands go up to circle Derek’s neck, his fingers comb Derek’s hair, his body melts against the weight and warmth of Derek'a.

This time, when Derek kisses him back, Stiles doesn’t feel like his life is ending.

He feels like it’s just beginning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> song for this chapter: the anchor, bastille
> 
> if you're still here, thank you, and I love you.


End file.
